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Aug 20

HomeSafeBench: A Benchmark for Embodied Vision-Language Models in Free-Exploration Home Safety Inspection

Safety hazards in the home are a leading cause of preventable domestic injuries, motivating an automated inspector that actively explores a home and reports hazards before they cause harm. We introduce HomeSafeBench, the first benchmark for free-exploration home safety inspection with egocentric visual feedback, in which an embodied agent navigates a fully interactive 3D home, adjusts its viewpoint, and reports hazards purely from rendered first-person views. Built on the VirtualHome simulator, it covers five categories of common household hazards and comprises 1,000 human-validated inspection tasks. Evaluating a broad range of state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) reveals a large gap, where the best model reaches only about 34.7% F1, far below the 98.0% of a human inspector. Moreover, precision far exceeds recall across models, revealing a systematic tendency to under-report hazards that reflects a shared deficiency in risk recognition. To close this gap at low cost, we propose CueBack, an offline data-construction method that exploits the clue-precedes-confirmation structure of inspection, backtracking a privileged trajectory to the earliest frame where a hazard cue becomes visible and rewriting it into executable supervision. Fine-tuning a 4B-size VLM on CueBack-constructed data raises the average F1 from 18.7% to 45.3% on an out-of-distribution test set, surpassing the strongest closed-source model performance 34.7%. The benchmark, training dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/BITHLP/HomeSafeBench.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 3

To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images ... For Now

The recent advances in diffusion models (DMs) have revolutionized the generation of realistic and complex images. However, these models also introduce potential safety hazards, such as producing harmful content and infringing data copyrights. Despite the development of safety-driven unlearning techniques to counteract these challenges, doubts about their efficacy persist. To tackle this issue, we introduce an evaluation framework that leverages adversarial prompts to discern the trustworthiness of these safety-driven DMs after they have undergone the process of unlearning harmful concepts. Specifically, we investigated the adversarial robustness of DMs, assessed by adversarial prompts, when eliminating unwanted concepts, styles, and objects. We develop an effective and efficient adversarial prompt generation approach for DMs, termed UnlearnDiffAtk. This method capitalizes on the intrinsic classification abilities of DMs to simplify the creation of adversarial prompts, thereby eliminating the need for auxiliary classification or diffusion models.Through extensive benchmarking, we evaluate the robustness of five widely-used safety-driven unlearned DMs (i.e., DMs after unlearning undesirable concepts, styles, or objects) across a variety of tasks. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency merits of UnlearnDiffAtk over the state-of-the-art adversarial prompt generation method and reveal the lack of robustness of current safety-driven unlearning techniques when applied to DMs. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Diffusion-MU-Attack. WARNING: This paper contains model outputs that may be offensive in nature.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023

UAV-SEAD: State Estimation Anomaly Dataset for UAVs

Accurate state estimation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for ensuring reliable and safe operation, as anomalies occurring during mission execution may induce discrepancies between expected and observed system behaviors, thereby compromising mission success or posing potential safety hazards. It is essential to continuously monitor and detect such conditions in order to ensure a timely response and maintain system reliability. In this work, we focus on UAV state estimation anomalies and provide a large-scale real-world UAV dataset to facilitate research aimed at improving the development of anomaly detection. Unlike existing datasets that primarily rely on injected faults into simulated data, this dataset comprises 1396 real flight logs totaling over 52 hours of flight time, collected across diverse indoor and outdoor environments using a collection of PX4-based UAVs equipped with a variety of sensor configurations. The dataset comprises both normal and anomalous flights without synthetic manipulation, making it uniquely suitable for realistic anomaly detection tasks. A structured classification is proposed that categorizes UAV state estimation anomalies into four classes: mechanical and electrical, external position, global position, and altitude anomalies. These classifications reflect collective, contextual, and outlier anomalies observed in multivariate sensor data streams, including IMU, GPS, barometer, magnetometer, distance sensors, visual odometry, and optical flow, that can be found in the PX4 logging mechanism. It is anticipated that this dataset will play a key role in the development, training, and evaluation of anomaly detection and isolation systems to address the critical gap in UAV reliability research.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 13

Verified Synthesis of Optimal Safety Controllers for Human-Robot Collaboration

We present a tool-supported approach for the synthesis, verification and validation of the control software responsible for the safety of the human-robot interaction in manufacturing processes that use collaborative robots. In human-robot collaboration, software-based safety controllers are used to improve operational safety, e.g., by triggering shutdown mechanisms or emergency stops to avoid accidents. Complex robotic tasks and increasingly close human-robot interaction pose new challenges to controller developers and certification authorities. Key among these challenges is the need to assure the correctness of safety controllers under explicit (and preferably weak) assumptions. Our controller synthesis, verification and validation approach is informed by the process, risk analysis, and relevant safety regulations for the target application. Controllers are selected from a design space of feasible controllers according to a set of optimality criteria, are formally verified against correctness criteria, and are translated into executable code and validated in a digital twin. The resulting controller can detect the occurrence of hazards, move the process into a safe state, and, in certain circumstances, return the process to an operational state from which it can resume its original task. We show the effectiveness of our software engineering approach through a case study involving the development of a safety controller for a manufacturing work cell equipped with a collaborative robot.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 11, 2021

Integration of Object Detection and Small VLMs for Construction Safety Hazard Identification

Accurate and timely identification of construction hazards around workers is essential for preventing workplace accidents. While large vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong contextual reasoning capabilities, their high computational requirements limit their applicability in near real-time construction hazard detection. In contrast, small vision-language models (sVLMs) with fewer than 4 billion parameters offer improved efficiency but often suffer from reduced accuracy and hallucination when analyzing complex construction scenes. To address this trade-off, this study proposes a detection-guided sVLM framework that integrates object detection with multimodal reasoning for contextual hazard identification. The framework first employs a YOLOv11n detector to localize workers and construction machinery within the scene. The detected entities are then embedded into structured prompts to guide the reasoning process of sVLMs, enabling spatially grounded hazard assessment. Within this framework, six sVLMs (Gemma-3 4B, Qwen-3-VL 2B/4B, InternVL-3 1B/2B, and SmolVLM-2B) were evaluated in zero-shot settings on a curated dataset of construction site images with hazard annotations and explanatory rationales. The proposed approach consistently improved hazard detection performance across all models. The best-performing model, Gemma-3 4B, achieved an F1-score of 50.6%, compared to 34.5% in the baseline configuration. Explanation quality also improved significantly, with BERTScore F1 increasing from 0.61 to 0.82. Despite incorporating object detection, the framework introduces minimal overhead, adding only 2.5 ms per image during inference. These results demonstrate that integrating lightweight object detection with small VLM reasoning provides an effective and efficient solution for context-aware construction safety hazard detection.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 5

EgoSafetyBench: A Diagnostic Egocentric Video Benchmark for Evaluating Embodied VLMs as Runtime Safety Guards

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now proposed as runtime safety guards for embodied agents in homes and factories. A deployable guard must catch genuinely unsafe situations while avoiding unnecessary intervention on routine but superficially alarming activity, a distinction that binary safety benchmarks obscure. We introduce EgoSafetyBench, an egocentric video benchmark of 1,200 robot-view scenarios annotated at half-second granularity, to evaluate VLMs as streaming guards across two tracks. The situational track (800 scenarios) spans four families, from routine and safe-but-suspicious scenes to obvious and contextual hazards. The visual-channel track (400 scenarios) targets in-scene text-a sign, sticker, or label visible in the scene-that can misrepresent the physical situation, pairing each misleading sign with a truthful version to test both whether a guard flags the text as misleading and whether the text corrupts its physical-safety judgment. Both tracks use contrastive ladders: near-identical scenarios differing only in a single visible deciding cue, so a correct call must hinge on that cue rather than the overall scene type. We evaluate ten open- and closed-source VLMs. We find that while guards reliably recognize videos containing hazards, they often miss specific hazardous moments, particularly contextual hazards. Furthermore, misleading in-scene signs degrade all tested guards: vulnerable models miss up to a third of hazards, while robust models over-intervene on safe content. Matched controls reveal that apparent safety robustness often reflects indiscriminate alarming rather than true physical reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 29

Discovering Agentic Safety Specifications from 1-Bit Danger Signals

Can large language model agents discover hidden safety objectives through experience alone? We introduce EPO-Safe (Experiential Prompt Optimization for Safe Agents), a framework where an LLM iteratively generates action plans, receives sparse binary danger warnings, and evolves a natural language behavioral specification through reflection. Unlike standard LLM reflection methods that rely on rich textual feedback (e.g., compiler errors or detailed environment responses), EPO-Safe demonstrates that LLMs can perform safety reasoning from a strictly impoverished signal in structured, low-dimensional environments: the agent never observes the hidden performance function R^*, only a single bit per timestep indicating that an action was unsafe. We evaluate on five AI Safety Gridworlds (Leike et al., 2017) and five text-based scenario analogs where visible reward R may diverge from R^*. EPO-Safe discovers safe behavior within 1-2 rounds (5-15 episodes), producing human-readable specifications with correct explanatory hypotheses about hazards (e.g., "X cells are directionally hazardous: entering from the north is dangerous"). Critically, we show that standard reward-driven reflection actively degrades safety: agents reflecting on reward alone use the loop to justify and accelerate reward hacking, proving that reflection must be paired with a dedicated safety channel to discover hidden constraints. We further evaluate robustness to noisy oracles: even when 50% of non-dangerous steps produce spurious warnings, mean safety performance degrades by only 15% on average, though sensitivity is environment-dependent, as cross-episode reflection naturally filters inconsistent signals. Each evolved specification functions as an auditable set of grounded behavioral rules discovered autonomously through interaction, rather than authored by humans as in Constitutional AI (Bai et al., 2022).

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 24 2

HomeSafe-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Unsafe Action Detection for Embodied Agents in Household Scenarios

The rapid evolution of embodied agents has accelerated the deployment of household robots in real-world environments. However, unlike structured industrial settings, household spaces introduce unpredictable safety risks, where system limitations such as perception latency and lack of common sense knowledge can lead to dangerous errors. Current safety evaluations, often restricted to static images, text, or general hazards, fail to adequately benchmark dynamic unsafe action detection in these specific contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce HomeSafe-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on unsafe action detection in household scenarios. HomeSafe-Bench is contrusted via a hybrid pipeline combining physical simulation with advanced video generation and features 438 diverse cases across six functional areas with fine-grained multidimensional annotations. Beyond benchmarking, we propose Hierarchical Dual-Brain Guard for Household Safety (HD-Guard), a hierarchical streaming architecture for real-time safety monitoring. HD-Guard coordinates a lightweight FastBrain for continuous high-frequency screening with an asynchronous large-scale SlowBrain for deep multimodal reasoning, effectively balancing inference efficiency with detection accuracy. Evaluations demonstrate that HD-Guard achieves a superior trade-off between latency and performance, while our analysis identifies critical bottlenecks in current VLM-based safety detection.

Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Reward Scaling for LLM Alignment

Robust alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based -- training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning (RL) -- or reward-free -- directly fine-tuning on ranked outputs. Recent research shows that well-tuned reward-based pipelines remain the most robust, and single-response demonstrations can outperform pairwise preference data. However, two key challenges remain: (i) imbalanced safety datasets that over-represent common hazards while neglecting long-tail threats; and (ii) static reward models that ignore task difficulty, limiting optimization efficiency and attainable gains. To address these limitations, we propose DR-IRL, which dynamically adjusts rewards through inverse reinforcement learning. We first construct a balanced safety dataset of seven harmful categories using Chain-of-Draft (CoD) template prompts, which reduce token usage and generation time compared to Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We then train category-specific reward models on this dataset via IRL. Finally, to align the LLM, we introduce GRPO-S (Group Relative Policy Optimization--Scaling), a variant of GRPO that scales the reward during optimization to task difficulty -- data-level hardness measured by CLIP similarity and model-level responsiveness measured by reward gaps. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and LLMs demonstrate that DR-IRL outperforms all baselines in safety alignment while maintaining usefulness.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 23, 2025

Bresa: Bio-inspired Reflexive Safe Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Tasks

Ensuring safety in reinforcement learning (RL)-based robotic systems is a critical challenge, especially in contact-rich tasks within unstructured environments. While the state-of-the-art safe RL approaches mitigate risks through safe exploration or high-level recovery mechanisms, they often overlook low-level execution safety, where reflexive responses to potential hazards are crucial. Similarly, variable impedance control (VIC) enhances safety by adjusting the robot's mechanical response, yet lacks a systematic way to adapt parameters, such as stiffness and damping throughout the task. In this paper, we propose Bresa, a Bio-inspired Reflexive Hierarchical Safe RL method inspired by biological reflexes. Our method decouples task learning from safety learning, incorporating a safety critic network that evaluates action risks and operates at a higher frequency than the task solver. Unlike existing recovery-based methods, our safety critic functions at a low-level control layer, allowing real-time intervention when unsafe conditions arise. The task-solving RL policy, running at a lower frequency, focuses on high-level planning (decision-making), while the safety critic ensures instantaneous safety corrections. We validate Bresa on multiple tasks including a contact-rich robotic task, demonstrating its reflexive ability to enhance safety, and adaptability in unforeseen dynamic environments. Our results show that Bresa outperforms the baseline, providing a robust and reflexive safety mechanism that bridges the gap between high-level planning and low-level execution. Real-world experiments and supplementary material are available at project website https://jack-sherman01.github.io/Bresa.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 27, 2025

Aegis2.0: A Diverse AI Safety Dataset and Risks Taxonomy for Alignment of LLM Guardrails

As Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI become increasingly widespread, concerns about content safety have grown in parallel. Currently, there is a clear lack of high-quality, human-annotated datasets that address the full spectrum of LLM-related safety risks and are usable for commercial applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a comprehensive and adaptable taxonomy for categorizing safety risks, structured into 12 top-level hazard categories with an extension to 9 fine-grained subcategories. This taxonomy is designed to meet the diverse requirements of downstream users, offering more granular and flexible tools for managing various risk types. Using a hybrid data generation pipeline that combines human annotations with a multi-LLM "jury" system to assess the safety of responses, we obtain Aegis 2.0, a carefully curated collection of 34,248 samples of human-LLM interactions, annotated according to our proposed taxonomy. To validate its effectiveness, we demonstrate that several lightweight models, trained using parameter-efficient techniques on Aegis 2.0, achieve performance competitive with leading safety models fully fine-tuned on much larger, non-commercial datasets. In addition, we introduce a novel training blend that combines safety with topic following data.This approach enhances the adaptability of guard models, enabling them to generalize to new risk categories defined during inference. We plan to open-source Aegis 2.0 data and models to the research community to aid in the safety guardrailing of LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025

HazardArena: Evaluating Semantic Safety in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit rich world knowledge from vision-language backbones and acquire executable skills via action demonstrations. However, existing evaluations largely focus on action execution success, leaving action policies loosely coupled with visual-linguistic semantics. This decoupling exposes a systematic vulnerability whereby correct action execution may induce unsafe outcomes under semantic risk. To expose this vulnerability, we introduce HazardArena, a benchmark designed to evaluate semantic safety in VLAs under controlled yet risk-bearing contexts. HazardArena is constructed from safe/unsafe twin scenarios that share matched objects, layouts, and action requirements, differing only in the semantic context that determines whether an action is unsafe. We find that VLA models trained exclusively on safe scenarios often fail to behave safely when evaluated in their corresponding unsafe counterparts. HazardArena includes over 2,000 assets and 40 risk-sensitive tasks spanning 7 real-world risk categories grounded in established robotic safety standards. To mitigate this vulnerability, we propose a training-free Safety Option Layer that constrains action execution using semantic attributes or a vision-language judge, substantially reducing unsafe behaviors with minimal impact on task performance. We hope that HazardArena highlights the need to rethink how semantic safety is evaluated and enforced in VLAs as they scale toward real-world deployment.

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 13

SOSBENCH: Benchmarking Safety Alignment on Scientific Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit advancing capabilities in complex tasks, such as reasoning and graduate-level question answering, yet their resilience against misuse, particularly involving scientifically sophisticated risks, remains underexplored. Existing safety benchmarks typically focus either on instructions requiring minimal knowledge comprehension (e.g., ``tell me how to build a bomb") or utilize prompts that are relatively low-risk (e.g., multiple-choice or classification tasks about hazardous content). Consequently, they fail to adequately assess model safety when handling knowledge-intensive, hazardous scenarios. To address this critical gap, we introduce SOSBench, a regulation-grounded, hazard-focused benchmark encompassing six high-risk scientific domains: chemistry, biology, medicine, pharmacology, physics, and psychology. The benchmark comprises 3,000 prompts derived from real-world regulations and laws, systematically expanded via an LLM-assisted evolutionary pipeline that introduces diverse, realistic misuse scenarios (e.g., detailed explosive synthesis instructions involving advanced chemical formulas). We evaluate frontier models within a unified evaluation framework using our SOSBench. Despite their alignment claims, advanced models consistently disclose policy-violating content across all domains, demonstrating alarmingly high rates of harmful responses (e.g., 79.1% for Deepseek-R1 and 47.3% for GPT-4.1). These results highlight significant safety alignment deficiencies and underscore urgent concerns regarding the responsible deployment of powerful LLMs.

  • 10 authors
·
May 27, 2025

Safe, or Simply Incapable? Rethinking Safety Evaluation for Phone-Use Agents

When a phone-use agent avoids harm, does that show safety, or simply inability to act? Existing evaluations often cannot tell. A harmful outcome may be avoided because the agent recognized the risk and chose the safe action, or because it failed to understand the screen or execute any relevant action at all. These cases have different causes and call for different fixes, yet current benchmarks often merge them under task success, refusal, or final harmful outcome. We address this problem with PhoneSafety, a benchmark of 700 safety-critical moments drawn from real phone interactions across more than 130 apps. Each instance isolates the next decision at a risky moment and asks a simple question: does the model take the safe action, take the unsafe action, or fail to do anything useful? We evaluate eight representative phone-use agents under this framework. Our results reveal two main patterns. First, stronger general phone-use ability does not reliably imply safer choices at risky moments. Models that perform better on ordinary app tasks are not always the ones that behave more safely when the next action matters. Second, failures to do anything useful behave like a capability signal rather than a safety signal: they are concentrated in more visually and operationally demanding settings and remain stable when the evaluation protocol changes. Across models, failures split into two recurring patterns: unsafe choices in settings where the model can act but chooses wrongly, and inability to act in more visually and operationally demanding screens. Overall, a harmless outcome is not enough to count as evidence of safety. Evaluating phone-use agents requires separating unsafe judgment from inability to act.

  • 21 authors
·
May 7 2

LabSafety Bench: Benchmarking LLMs on Safety Issues in Scientific Labs

Laboratory accidents pose significant risks to human life and property, underscoring the importance of robust safety protocols. Despite advancements in safety training, laboratory personnel may still unknowingly engage in unsafe practices. With the increasing reliance on large language models (LLMs) for guidance in various fields, including laboratory settings, there is a growing concern about their reliability in critical safety-related decision-making. Unlike trained human researchers, LLMs lack formal lab safety education, raising questions about their ability to provide safe and accurate guidance. Existing research on LLM trustworthiness primarily focuses on issues such as ethical compliance, truthfulness, and fairness but fails to fully cover safety-critical real-world applications, like lab safety. To address this gap, we propose the Laboratory Safety Benchmark (LabSafety Bench), a comprehensive evaluation framework based on a new taxonomy aligned with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protocols. This benchmark includes 765 multiple-choice questions verified by human experts, assessing LLMs and vision language models (VLMs) performance in lab safety contexts. Our evaluations demonstrate that while GPT-4o outperforms human participants, it is still prone to critical errors, highlighting the risks of relying on LLMs in safety-critical environments. Our findings emphasize the need for specialized benchmarks to accurately assess the trustworthiness of LLMs in real-world safety applications.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 18, 2024 1

SafetyDrift: Predicting When AI Agents Cross the Line Before They Actually Do

When an LLM agent reads a confidential file, then writes a summary, then emails it externally, no single step is unsafe, but the sequence is a data leak. We call this safety drift: individually safe actions compounding into violations. Prior work has measured this problem; we predict it. SafetyDrift models agent safety trajectories as absorbing Markov chains, computing the probability that a trajectory will reach a violation within a given number of steps via closed form absorption analysis. A consequence of the monotonic state design is that every agent will eventually violate safety if left unsupervised (absorption probability 1.0 from all states), making the practical question not if but when, and motivating our focus on finite horizon prediction. Across 357 traces spanning 40 realistic tasks in four categories, we discover that "points of no return" are sharply task dependent: in communication tasks, agents that reach even a mild risk state have an 85% chance of violating safety within five steps, while in technical tasks the probability stays below 5% from any state. A lightweight monitor built on these models detects 94.7% of violations with 3.7 steps of advance warning at negligible computational cost, outperforming both keyword matching (44.7% detection, 55.9% false positive rate) and per step LLM judges (52.6% detection, 38.2% false positive rate) while running over 60,000x faster.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 27

SafePro: Evaluating the Safety of Professional-Level AI Agents

Large language model-based agents are rapidly evolving from simple conversational assistants into autonomous systems capable of performing complex, professional-level tasks in various domains. While these advancements promise significant productivity gains, they also introduce critical safety risks that remain under-explored. Existing safety evaluations primarily focus on simple, daily assistance tasks, failing to capture the intricate decision-making processes and potential consequences of misaligned behaviors in professional settings. To address this gap, we introduce SafePro, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety alignment of AI agents performing professional activities. SafePro features a dataset of high-complexity tasks across diverse professional domains with safety risks, developed through a rigorous iterative creation and review process. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art AI models reveals significant safety vulnerabilities and uncovers new unsafe behaviors in professional contexts. We further show that these models exhibit both insufficient safety judgment and weak safety alignment when executing complex professional tasks. In addition, we investigate safety mitigation strategies for improving agent safety in these scenarios and observe encouraging improvements. Together, our findings highlight the urgent need for robust safety mechanisms tailored to the next generation of professional AI agents.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 12

SafeScientist: Toward Risk-Aware Scientific Discoveries by LLM Agents

Recent advancements in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet concurrently raised critical ethical and safety concerns. To systematically address these challenges, we introduce SafeScientist, an innovative AI scientist framework explicitly designed to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. SafeScientist proactively refuses ethically inappropriate or high-risk tasks and rigorously emphasizes safety throughout the research process. To achieve comprehensive safety oversight, we integrate multiple defensive mechanisms, including prompt monitoring, agent-collaboration monitoring, tool-use monitoring, and an ethical reviewer component. Complementing SafeScientist, we propose SciSafetyBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate AI safety in scientific contexts, comprising 240 high-risk scientific tasks across 6 domains, alongside 30 specially designed scientific tools and 120 tool-related risk tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeScientist significantly improves safety performance by 35\% compared to traditional AI scientist frameworks, without compromising scientific output quality. Additionally, we rigorously validate the robustness of our safety pipeline against diverse adversarial attack methods, further confirming the effectiveness of our integrated approach. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/SafeScientist. red{Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful.}

  • 9 authors
·
May 29, 2025 2

What Breaks When LLMs Code? Characterizing Operational Safety Failures of Agentic Code Assistants

Autonomous coding agents built on large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being integrated into development workflows, yet their operational safety properties remain poorly understood beyond evaluations of explicitly malicious inputs. In practice, high-impact failures arise during benign, goal-directed use through environment breakage, fabricated success reports, etc. that current benchmarks do not capture. What categories of operational safety failures actually occur when coding agents are used for everyday development tasks and what is their impact? We present an incident-driven empirical study grounded in two complementary evidence streams. We screen 68,816 papers from 22 premier venues, curating 185 safety-relevant studies, and mine 16,586 GitHub issues from widely deployed LLM-powered coding tools, manually confirming 547 genuine safety failures. Applying systematic open coding over both corpora, we derive a multi-dimensional safety taxonomy of 33 operational risk types organized across seven dimensions, and annotate each incident with contributing factors, task context, severity, and downstream impact. Our findings show that coding-agent failures are often severe, with 326 of 547 incidents rated high or critical. The dominant risks are constraint violations, destructive operations, authorization bypasses, and deception, and over 65% of incidents arise in bug fixing and setup or configuration, patterns largely missing from prior literature. These results have direct implications for SE tool designers and benchmark developers: guardrails must go beyond adversarial-prompt defenses to enforce environmental constraints, failure transparency, and safe-halt behaviors.

  • 2 authors
·
May 28

DeepKnown-Guard: A Proprietary Model-Based Safety Response Framework for AI Agents

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), their associated security issues have become increasingly prominent, severely constraining their trustworthy deployment in critical domains. This paper proposes a novel safety response framework designed to systematically safeguard LLMs at both the input and output levels. At the input level, the framework employs a supervised fine-tuning-based safety classification model. Through a fine-grained four-tier taxonomy (Safe, Unsafe, Conditionally Safe, Focused Attention), it performs precise risk identification and differentiated handling of user queries, significantly enhancing risk coverage and business scenario adaptability, and achieving a risk recall rate of 99.3%. At the output level, the framework integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with a specifically fine-tuned interpretation model, ensuring all responses are grounded in a real-time, trustworthy knowledge base. This approach eliminates information fabrication and enables result traceability. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed safety control model achieves a significantly higher safety score on public safety evaluation benchmarks compared to the baseline model, TinyR1-Safety-8B. Furthermore, on our proprietary high-risk test set, the framework's components attained a perfect 100% safety score, validating their exceptional protective capabilities in complex risk scenarios. This research provides an effective engineering pathway for building high-security, high-trust LLM applications.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

SafeAgentBench: A Benchmark for Safe Task Planning of Embodied LLM Agents

With the integration of large language models (LLMs), embodied agents have strong capabilities to understand and plan complicated natural language instructions. However, a foreseeable issue is that those embodied agents can also flawlessly execute some hazardous tasks, potentially causing damages in the real world. Existing benchmarks predominantly overlook critical safety risks, focusing solely on planning performance, while a few evaluate LLMs' safety awareness only on non-interactive image-text data. To address this gap, we present SafeAgentBench-the first benchmark for safety-aware task planning of embodied LLM agents in interactive simulation environments. SafeAgentBench includes: (1) an executable, diverse, and high-quality dataset of 750 tasks, rigorously curated to cover 10 potential hazards and 3 task types; (2) SafeAgentEnv, a universal embodied environment with a low-level controller, supporting multi-agent execution with 17 high-level actions for 8 state-of-the-art baselines; and (3) reliable evaluation methods from both execution and semantic perspectives. Experimental results show that, although agents based on different design frameworks exhibit substantial differences in task success rates, their overall safety awareness remains weak. The most safety-conscious baseline achieves only a 10\% rejection rate for detailed hazardous tasks. Moreover, simply replacing the LLM driving the agent does not lead to notable improvements in safety awareness. More details and code are available at https://github.com/shengyin1224/SafeAgentBench.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Estimating Tail Risks in Language Model Output Distributions

Language models are increasingly capable and are being rapidly deployed on a population-level scale. As a result, the safety of these models is increasingly high-stakes. Fortunately, advances in alignment have significantly reduced the likelihood of harmful model outputs. However, when models are queried billions of times in a day, even rare worst-case behaviors will occur. Current safety evaluations focus on capturing the distribution of inputs that yield harmful outputs. These evaluations disregard the probabilistic nature of models and their tail output behavior. To measure this tail risk, we propose a method to efficiently estimate the probability of harmful outputs for any input query. Instead of naive brute-force sampling from the target model, where harmful outputs could be rare, we operationalize importance sampling by creating unsafe versions of the target model. These unsafe versions enable sample-efficient estimation by making harmful outputs more probable. On benchmarks measuring misuse and misalignment, these estimates match brute-force Monte Carlo estimates using 10-20x fewer samples. For example, we can estimate probability of harmful outputs on the order of 10^-4 with just 500 samples. Additionally, we find that these harmfulness estimates can reveal the sensitivity of models to perturbations in model input and predict deployment risks. Our work demonstrates that accurate rare-event estimation is both critical and feasible for safety evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/rangell/LMTailRisk

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 23

AEGIS: Online Adaptive AI Content Safety Moderation with Ensemble of LLM Experts

As Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI become more widespread, the content safety risks associated with their use also increase. We find a notable deficiency in high-quality content safety datasets and benchmarks that comprehensively cover a wide range of critical safety areas. To address this, we define a broad content safety risk taxonomy, comprising 13 critical risk and 9 sparse risk categories. Additionally, we curate AEGISSAFETYDATASET, a new dataset of approximately 26, 000 human-LLM interaction instances, complete with human annotations adhering to the taxonomy. We plan to release this dataset to the community to further research and to help benchmark LLM models for safety. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset, we instruction-tune multiple LLM-based safety models. We show that our models (named AEGISSAFETYEXPERTS), not only surpass or perform competitively with the state-of-the-art LLM-based safety models and general purpose LLMs, but also exhibit robustness across multiple jail-break attack categories. We also show how using AEGISSAFETYDATASET during the LLM alignment phase does not negatively impact the performance of the aligned models on MT Bench scores. Furthermore, we propose AEGIS, a novel application of a no-regret online adaptation framework with strong theoretical guarantees, to perform content moderation with an ensemble of LLM content safety experts in deployment

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 8, 2024

When Medical Safety Alignment Fails: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on High-Risk Medical Queries

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for medical and health-related questions, yet their safety in high-risk medical scenarios remains poorly understood. We introduce MedHarmCode and data will be released upon acceptance. Due to the sensitive nature of high-risk medical queries, data access will be available to qualified researchers upon request., a high-risk medical safety benchmark with 1,100 medically grounded queries across 10 safety-critical categories, including toxicology, pharmacology, covert poisoning, anesthesia, and fetal harm. Unlike broad medical QA benchmarks, MedHarm targets realistic clinical, educational, and technical prompts that require refusal, caution, or safe redirection rather than direct helpfulness. We evaluate 15 LLMs spanning general-purpose, medical-purpose, closed-source, and downstream SFT models, together with 4 representative guardrail models. Results reveal a substantial gap between apparent alignment and medical safety: aligned models can still produce unsafe or actionable responses, medical fine-tuning can amplify harmful specificity, and external guardrails reduce some failures while introducing brittle blocking and weak safe helpfulness. These findings show that medical safety cannot be inferred from general alignment or medical capability alone, highlighting the need for domain-specific stress testing before deploying LLMs in safety-critical medical applications.

  • 8 authors
·
May 25

No Safe Dose: How Training Data Drives Unsafe Image Generation

Text-to-image models trained on large-scale data often inevitably ingest unsafe content. While some people observe input-output amplifications, it remains unclear whether and how training data composition directly drives model output safety or by other factors. We shed light on this question by isolating this variable: we train the same text-to-image model on datasets that differ only in their fraction of unsafe images (0\% to 9.6\%), across several dataset scales (100K to 8M). Then we generate images with the resulting models, and evaluate them with four independent safety classifiers. Output unsafety rises monotonically from 16.6\% at 0\% contamination to 25.5\% at 5\%. A factorial design reveals that the proportion, not the absolute count, of unsafe training images is the operative variable. The 16.6\% irreducible baseline at zero contamination implicates the other components, e.g. frozen text encoder, as a residual safety risk -- confirmed by a text encoder ablation showing that SafeCLIP reduces this floor to 9.6\%, while the dose-response effect persists across all three encoders tested. Critically, no quality degradation in terms of FID, CLIPscore and ImageReward accompanies safety filtering. These results establish that data curation and text encoder safety are complementary and independently effective interventions. At the same time, the remaining level of unsafety poses questions for future research about emerging capabilities and compositionality.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26

RiOSWorld: Benchmarking the Risk of Multimodal Compter-Use Agents

With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), they are increasingly deployed as autonomous computer-use agents capable of accomplishing complex computer tasks. However, a pressing issue arises: Can the safety risk principles designed and aligned for general MLLMs in dialogue scenarios be effectively transferred to real-world computer-use scenarios? Existing research on evaluating the safety risks of MLLM-based computer-use agents suffers from several limitations: it either lacks realistic interactive environments, or narrowly focuses on one or a few specific risk types. These limitations ignore the complexity, variability, and diversity of real-world environments, thereby restricting comprehensive risk evaluation for computer-use agents. To this end, we introduce RiOSWorld, a benchmark designed to evaluate the potential risks of MLLM-based agents during real-world computer manipulations. Our benchmark includes 492 risky tasks spanning various computer applications, involving web, social media, multimedia, os, email, and office software. We categorize these risks into two major classes based on their risk source: (i) User-originated risks and (ii) Environmental risks. For the evaluation, we evaluate safety risks from two perspectives: (i) Risk goal intention and (ii) Risk goal completion. Extensive experiments with multimodal agents on RiOSWorld demonstrate that current computer-use agents confront significant safety risks in real-world scenarios. Our findings highlight the necessity and urgency of safety alignment for computer-use agents in real-world computer manipulation, providing valuable insights for developing trustworthy computer-use agents. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://yjyddq.github.io/RiOSWorld.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
May 31, 2025 2

SimpleSafetyTests: a Test Suite for Identifying Critical Safety Risks in Large Language Models

The past year has seen rapid acceleration in the development of large language models (LLMs). However, without proper steering and safeguards, LLMs will readily follow malicious instructions, provide unsafe advice, and generate toxic content. We introduce SimpleSafetyTests (SST) as a new test suite for rapidly and systematically identifying such critical safety risks. The test suite comprises 100 test prompts across five harm areas that LLMs, for the vast majority of applications, should refuse to comply with. We test 11 open-access and open-source LLMs and four closed-source LLMs, and find critical safety weaknesses. While some of the models do not give a single unsafe response, most give unsafe responses to more than 20% of the prompts, with over 50% unsafe responses in the extreme. Prepending a safety-emphasising system prompt substantially reduces the occurrence of unsafe responses, but does not completely stop them from happening. Trained annotators labelled every model response to SST (n = 3,000). We use these annotations to evaluate five AI safety filters (which assess whether a models' response is unsafe given a prompt) as a way of automatically evaluating models' performance on SST. The filters' performance varies considerably. There are also differences across the five harm areas, and on the unsafe versus safe responses. The widely-used Perspective API has 72% accuracy and a newly-created zero-shot prompt to OpenAI's GPT-4 performs best with 89% accuracy. Content Warning: This paper contains prompts and responses that relate to child abuse, suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, scams and fraud, illegal items, and physical harm.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

On the Role of Attention Heads in Large Language Model Safety

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple language tasks, yet their safety guardrails can be circumvented, leading to harmful generations. In light of this, recent research on safety mechanisms has emerged, revealing that when safety representations or component are suppressed, the safety capability of LLMs are compromised. However, existing research tends to overlook the safety impact of multi-head attention mechanisms, despite their crucial role in various model functionalities. Hence, in this paper, we aim to explore the connection between standard attention mechanisms and safety capability to fill this gap in the safety-related mechanistic interpretability. We propose a novel metric which tailored for multi-head attention, the Safety Head ImPortant Score (Ships), to assess the individual heads' contributions to model safety. Based on this, we generalize Ships to the dataset level and further introduce the Safety Attention Head AttRibution Algorithm (Sahara) to attribute the critical safety attention heads inside the model. Our findings show that the special attention head has a significant impact on safety. Ablating a single safety head allows aligned model (e.g., Llama-2-7b-chat) to respond to 16 times more harmful queries, while only modifying 0.006% of the parameters, in contrast to the ~ 5% modification required in previous studies. More importantly, we demonstrate that attention heads primarily function as feature extractors for safety and models fine-tuned from the same base model exhibit overlapping safety heads through comprehensive experiments. Together, our attribution approach and findings provide a novel perspective for unpacking the black box of safety mechanisms within large models.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

ROBOSHACKLES: A Safety Dataset for Human-Injury Prevention in Embodied Foundation Models

Embodied Foundation Models (EFMs) integrate multimodal understanding, future-state reasoning, and executable robot actions. Yet their safety alignment for human-injury prevention remains underexplored, primarily because real-world data of robots harming humans or creating hazardous household situations cannot be safely or ethically collected. To address this challenge, we propose a safety-critical data construction pipeline for human-injury prevention in EFMs.Starting from real DROID observations, our construction pipeline proceeds through scene understanding, hazard-aware image editing, temporal prompt generation, and single-pass rollout synthesis. The temporal prompts specify the expected scene evolution, while Wan2.7 synthesizes realistic robotic rollouts from the edited hazardous states in a single pass. Using this pipeline, we construct ROBOSHACKLES, a 10,000-clip robotic video dataset derived from real DROID observations, spanning two direct-harm and four indirect-harm categories. To ensure dataset quality, we assess task completion and visual quality with automatic metrics, and evaluate six representative EFMs under a refusal-based safety criterion. Results show that all evaluated models produce unsafe actions in the tested safety-critical scenarios, yielding a 100% unsafe action generation rate. ROBOSHACKLES serves as a scalable benchmark and training resource for refusal learning and hazard anticipation before robot action execution.The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/YZW00/RoboShackles.

  • 5 authors
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Jun 16

MobileSafetyBench: Evaluating Safety of Autonomous Agents in Mobile Device Control

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show promising potential in assistive tasks across various domains, including mobile device control. As these agents interact directly with personal information and device settings, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior is crucial to prevent undesirable outcomes. However, no benchmark exists for standardized evaluation of the safety of mobile device-control agents. In this work, we introduce MobileSafetyBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of device-control agents within a realistic mobile environment based on Android emulators. We develop a diverse set of tasks involving interactions with various mobile applications, including messaging and banking applications. To clearly evaluate safety apart from general capabilities, we design separate tasks measuring safety and tasks evaluating helpfulness. The safety tasks challenge agents with managing potential risks prevalent in daily life and include tests to evaluate robustness against indirect prompt injections. Our experiments demonstrate that while baseline agents, based on state-of-the-art LLMs, perform well in executing helpful tasks, they show poor performance in safety tasks. To mitigate these safety concerns, we propose a prompting method that encourages agents to prioritize safety considerations. While this method shows promise in promoting safer behaviors, there is still considerable room for improvement to fully earn user trust. This highlights the urgent need for continued research to develop more robust safety mechanisms in mobile environments. We open-source our benchmark at: https://mobilesafetybench.github.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 22, 2024

Holistic Safety and Responsibility Evaluations of Advanced AI Models

Safety and responsibility evaluations of advanced AI models are a critical but developing field of research and practice. In the development of Google DeepMind's advanced AI models, we innovated on and applied a broad set of approaches to safety evaluation. In this report, we summarise and share elements of our evolving approach as well as lessons learned for a broad audience. Key lessons learned include: First, theoretical underpinnings and frameworks are invaluable to organise the breadth of risk domains, modalities, forms, metrics, and goals. Second, theory and practice of safety evaluation development each benefit from collaboration to clarify goals, methods and challenges, and facilitate the transfer of insights between different stakeholders and disciplines. Third, similar key methods, lessons, and institutions apply across the range of concerns in responsibility and safety - including established and emerging harms. For this reason it is important that a wide range of actors working on safety evaluation and safety research communities work together to develop, refine and implement novel evaluation approaches and best practices, rather than operating in silos. The report concludes with outlining the clear need to rapidly advance the science of evaluations, to integrate new evaluations into the development and governance of AI, to establish scientifically-grounded norms and standards, and to promote a robust evaluation ecosystem.

  • 19 authors
·
Apr 22, 2024

Automating Safety Enhancement for LLM-based Agents with Synthetic Risk Scenarios

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in real-world applications such as "digital assistants, autonomous customer service, and decision-support systems", where their ability to "interact in multi-turn, tool-augmented environments" makes them indispensable. However, ensuring the safety of these agents remains a significant challenge due to the diverse and complex risks arising from dynamic user interactions, external tool usage, and the potential for unintended harmful behaviors. To address this critical issue, we propose AutoSafe, the first framework that systematically enhances agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. Concretely, 1) we introduce an open and extensible threat model, OTS, which formalizes how unsafe behaviors emerge from the interplay of user instructions, interaction contexts, and agent actions. This enables precise modeling of safety risks across diverse scenarios. 2) we develop a fully automated data generation pipeline that simulates unsafe user behaviors, applies self-reflective reasoning to generate safe responses, and constructs a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality safety training dataset-eliminating the need for hazardous real-world data collection. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we design comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world safety benchmarks. Results demonstrate that AutoSafe boosts safety scores by 45% on average and achieves a 28.91% improvement on real-world tasks, validating the generalization ability of our learned safety strategies. These results highlight the practical advancement and scalability of AutoSafe in building safer LLM-based agents for real-world deployment. We have released the project page at https://auto-safe.github.io/.

  • 10 authors
·
May 23, 2025 1

An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked growing concerns among experts, policymakers, and world leaders regarding the potential for increasingly advanced AI systems to pose catastrophic risks. Although numerous risks have been detailed separately, there is a pressing need for a systematic discussion and illustration of the potential dangers to better inform efforts to mitigate them. This paper provides an overview of the main sources of catastrophic AI risks, which we organize into four categories: malicious use, in which individuals or groups intentionally use AIs to cause harm; AI race, in which competitive environments compel actors to deploy unsafe AIs or cede control to AIs; organizational risks, highlighting how human factors and complex systems can increase the chances of catastrophic accidents; and rogue AIs, describing the inherent difficulty in controlling agents far more intelligent than humans. For each category of risk, we describe specific hazards, present illustrative stories, envision ideal scenarios, and propose practical suggestions for mitigating these dangers. Our goal is to foster a comprehensive understanding of these risks and inspire collective and proactive efforts to ensure that AIs are developed and deployed in a safe manner. Ultimately, we hope this will allow us to realize the benefits of this powerful technology while minimizing the potential for catastrophic outcomes.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

AIR-Bench 2024: A Safety Benchmark Based on Risk Categories from Regulations and Policies

Foundation models (FMs) provide societal benefits but also amplify risks. Governments, companies, and researchers have proposed regulatory frameworks, acceptable use policies, and safety benchmarks in response. However, existing public benchmarks often define safety categories based on previous literature, intuitions, or common sense, leading to disjointed sets of categories for risks specified in recent regulations and policies, which makes it challenging to evaluate and compare FMs across these benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce AIR-Bench 2024, the first AI safety benchmark aligned with emerging government regulations and company policies, following the regulation-based safety categories grounded in our AI risks study, AIR 2024. AIR 2024 decomposes 8 government regulations and 16 company policies into a four-tiered safety taxonomy with 314 granular risk categories in the lowest tier. AIR-Bench 2024 contains 5,694 diverse prompts spanning these categories, with manual curation and human auditing to ensure quality. We evaluate leading language models on AIR-Bench 2024, uncovering insights into their alignment with specified safety concerns. By bridging the gap between public benchmarks and practical AI risks, AIR-Bench 2024 provides a foundation for assessing model safety across jurisdictions, fostering the development of safer and more responsible AI systems.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

Prompting4Debugging: Red-Teaming Text-to-Image Diffusion Models by Finding Problematic Prompts

Text-to-image diffusion models, e.g. Stable Diffusion (SD), lately have shown remarkable ability in high-quality content generation, and become one of the representatives for the recent wave of transformative AI. Nevertheless, such advance comes with an intensifying concern about the misuse of this generative technology, especially for producing copyrighted or NSFW (i.e. not safe for work) images. Although efforts have been made to filter inappropriate images/prompts or remove undesirable concepts/styles via model fine-tuning, the reliability of these safety mechanisms against diversified problematic prompts remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose Prompting4Debugging (P4D) as a debugging and red-teaming tool that automatically finds problematic prompts for diffusion models to test the reliability of a deployed safety mechanism. We demonstrate the efficacy of our P4D tool in uncovering new vulnerabilities of SD models with safety mechanisms. Particularly, our result shows that around half of prompts in existing safe prompting benchmarks which were originally considered "safe" can actually be manipulated to bypass many deployed safety mechanisms, including concept removal, negative prompt, and safety guidance. Our findings suggest that, without comprehensive testing, the evaluations on limited safe prompting benchmarks can lead to a false sense of safety for text-to-image models.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 12, 2023

ForesightSafety Bench: A Frontier Risk Evaluation and Governance Framework towards Safe AI

Rapidly evolving AI exhibits increasingly strong autonomy and goal-directed capabilities, accompanied by derivative systemic risks that are more unpredictable, difficult to control, and potentially irreversible. However, current AI safety evaluation systems suffer from critical limitations such as restricted risk dimensions and failed frontier risk detection. The lagging safety benchmarks and alignment technologies can hardly address the complex challenges posed by cutting-edge AI models. To bridge this gap, we propose the "ForesightSafety Bench" AI Safety Evaluation Framework, beginning with 7 major Fundamental Safety pillars and progressively extends to advanced Embodied AI Safety, AI4Science Safety, Social and Environmental AI risks, Catastrophic and Existential Risks, as well as 8 critical industrial safety domains, forming a total of 94 refined risk dimensions. To date, the benchmark has accumulated tens of thousands of structured risk data points and assessment results, establishing a widely encompassing, hierarchically clear, and dynamically evolving AI safety evaluation framework. Based on this benchmark, we conduct systematic evaluation and in-depth analysis of over twenty mainstream advanced large models, identifying key risk patterns and their capability boundaries. The safety capability evaluation results reveals the widespread safety vulnerabilities of frontier AI across multiple pillars, particularly focusing on Risky Agentic Autonomy, AI4Science Safety, Embodied AI Safety, Social AI Safety and Catastrophic and Existential Risks. Our benchmark is released at https://github.com/Beijing-AISI/ForesightSafety-Bench. The project website is available at https://foresightsafety-bench.beijing-aisi.ac.cn/.

  • 21 authors
·
Feb 15

How Should We Enhance the Safety of Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Study

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not necessarily translate to improved safety performance-and in some cases, may even degrade it. This raises an important research question: how can we enhance the safety of LRMs? In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on how to enhance the safety of LRMs through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Our investigation begins with an unexpected observation: directly distilling safe responses from DeepSeek-R1 fails to significantly enhance safety. We analyze this phenomenon and identify three key failure patterns that contribute to it. We then demonstrate that explicitly addressing these issues during the data distillation process can lead to substantial safety improvements. Next, we explore whether a long and complex reasoning process is necessary for achieving safety. Interestingly, we find that simply using short or template-based reasoning process can attain comparable safety performance-and are significantly easier for models to learn than more intricate reasoning chains. These findings prompt a deeper reflection on the role of reasoning in ensuring safety. Finally, we find that mixing math reasoning data during safety fine-tuning is helpful to balance safety and over-refusal. Overall, we hope our empirical study could provide a more holistic picture on enhancing the safety of LRMs. The code and data used in our experiments are released in https://github.com/thu-coai/LRM-Safety-Study.

  • 11 authors
·
May 21, 2025 2

Qwen3Guard Technical Report

As large language models (LLMs) become more capable and widely used, ensuring the safety of their outputs is increasingly critical. Existing guardrail models, though useful in static evaluation settings, face two major limitations in real-world applications: (1) they typically output only binary "safe/unsafe" labels, which can be interpreted inconsistently across diverse safety policies, rendering them incapable of accommodating varying safety tolerances across domains; and (2) they require complete model outputs before performing safety checks, making them fundamentally incompatible with streaming LLM inference, thereby preventing timely intervention during generation and increasing exposure to harmful partial outputs. To address these challenges, we present Qwen3Guard, a series of multilingual safety guardrail models with two specialized variants: Generative Qwen3Guard, which casts safety classification as an instruction-following task to enable fine-grained tri-class judgments (safe, controversial, unsafe); and Stream Qwen3Guard, which introduces a token-level classification head for real-time safety monitoring during incremental text generation. Both variants are available in three sizes (0.6B, 4B, and 8B parameters) and support up to 119 languages and dialects, providing comprehensive, scalable, and low-latency safety moderation for global LLM deployments. Evaluated across English, Chinese, and multilingual benchmarks, Qwen3Guard achieves state-of-the-art performance in both prompt and response safety classification. All models are released under the Apache 2.0 license for public use.

Qwen Qwen
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Oct 16, 2025 2

SafeRelBench: A Spatial-Relation-Aware Benchmark for Process-Level Safety in VLM-Driven Embodied Agents

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as the reasoning backbone of embodied agents, enabling robots to interpret visual scenes, follow language instructions, and plan multi-step actions. In household environments, however, safety depends not only on recognizing objects, but also on how actions change the physical scene over time. Existing embodied safety evaluations largely focus on static risk recognition, unsafe instruction refusal, or final-state task completion. As a result, process-level safety failures induced by spatial relations such as support, containment, and proximity remain insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we introduce SAFERELBENCH, a spatial-relation-aware safety benchmark with 507 executable evaluation samples, including 248 spatial-relation samples and 259 non-spatial control samples. Using SAFERELBENCH to evaluate seven open- and closed-source VLM-driven embodied agents, we find a substantial gap between task success and process-level safety compliance: models often complete the requested task while violating process-level safety constraints. Unlike prior benchmarks, SAFERELBENCH explicitly tests whether agents satisfy safety conditions before risk-prone actions, making spatial relations a core dimension in embodied safety assessment. More broadly, our results show that safe embodied intelligence requires not only stronger perception and planning, but also reliable reasoning about how object relations shape risk during interaction.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 15

Shape it Up! Restoring LLM Safety during Finetuning

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) enables user-specific customization but introduces critical safety risks: even a few harmful examples can compromise safety alignment. A common mitigation strategy is to update the model more strongly on examples deemed safe, while downweighting or excluding those flagged as unsafe. However, because safety context can shift within a single example, updating the model equally on both harmful and harmless parts of a response is suboptimal-a coarse treatment we term static safety shaping. In contrast, we propose dynamic safety shaping (DSS), a framework that uses fine-grained safety signals to reinforce learning from safe segments of a response while suppressing unsafe content. To enable such fine-grained control during finetuning, we introduce a key insight: guardrail models, traditionally used for filtering, can be repurposed to evaluate partial responses, tracking how safety risk evolves throughout the response, segment by segment. This leads to the Safety Trajectory Assessment of Response (STAR), a token-level signal that enables shaping to operate dynamically over the training sequence. Building on this, we present STAR-DSS, guided by STAR scores, that robustly mitigates finetuning risks and delivers substantial safety improvements across diverse threats, datasets, and model families-all without compromising capability on intended tasks. We encourage future safety research to build on dynamic shaping principles for stronger mitigation against evolving finetuning risks.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2025

How Does Vision-Language Adaptation Impact the Safety of Vision Language Models?

Vision-Language adaptation (VL adaptation) transforms Large Language Models (LLMs) into Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for multimodal tasks, but this process often compromises the inherent safety capabilities embedded in the original LLMs. Despite potential harmfulness due to weakened safety measures, in-depth analysis on the effects of VL adaptation on safety remains under-explored. This study examines how VL adaptation influences safety and evaluates the impact of safety fine-tuning methods. Our analysis reveals that safety degradation occurs during VL adaptation, even when the training data is safe. While safety tuning techniques like supervised fine-tuning with safety datasets or reinforcement learning from human feedback mitigate some risks, they still lead to safety degradation and a reduction in helpfulness due to over-rejection issues. Further analysis of internal model weights suggests that VL adaptation may impact certain safety-related layers, potentially lowering overall safety levels. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that the objectives of VL adaptation and safety tuning are divergent, which often results in their simultaneous application being suboptimal. To address this, we suggest the weight merging approach as an optimal solution effectively reducing safety degradation while maintaining helpfulness. These insights help guide the development of more reliable and secure LVLMs for real-world applications.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

A safety realignment framework via subspace-oriented model fusion for large language models

The current safeguard mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are indeed susceptible to jailbreak attacks, making them inherently fragile. Even the process of fine-tuning on apparently benign data for downstream tasks can jeopardize safety. One potential solution is to conduct safety fine-tuning subsequent to downstream fine-tuning. However, there's a risk of catastrophic forgetting during safety fine-tuning, where LLMs may regain safety measures but lose the task-specific knowledge acquired during downstream fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce a safety realignment framework through subspace-oriented model fusion (SOMF), aiming to combine the safeguard capabilities of initially aligned model and the current fine-tuned model into a realigned model. Our approach begins by disentangling all task vectors from the weights of each fine-tuned model. We then identify safety-related regions within these vectors by subspace masking techniques. Finally, we explore the fusion of the initial safely aligned LLM with all task vectors based on the identified safety subspace. We validate that our safety realignment framework satisfies the safety requirements of a single fine-tuned model as well as multiple models during their fusion. Our findings confirm that SOMF preserves safety without notably compromising performance on downstream tasks, including instruction following in Chinese, English, and Hindi, as well as problem-solving capabilities in Code and Math.

  • 5 authors
·
May 14, 2024

SafeCOMM: What about Safety Alignment in Fine-Tuned Telecom Large Language Models?

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for telecom tasks and datasets is a common practice to adapt general-purpose models to the telecom domain. However, little attention has been paid to how this process may compromise model safety. Recent research has shown that even benign fine-tuning can degrade the safety alignment of LLMs, causing them to respond to harmful or unethical user queries. In this paper, we investigate this issue for telecom-tuned LLMs using three representative datasets featured by the GenAINet initiative. We show that safety degradation persists even for structured and seemingly harmless datasets such as 3GPP standards and tabular records, indicating that telecom-specific data is not immune to safety erosion during fine-tuning. We further extend our analysis to publicly available Telecom LLMs trained via continual pre-training, revealing that safety alignment is often severely lacking, primarily due to the omission of safety-focused instruction tuning. To address these issues in both fine-tuned and pre-trained models, we conduct extensive experiments and evaluate three safety realignment defenses (SafeInstruct, SafeLoRA, and SafeMERGE) using established red-teaming benchmarks. The results show that, across all settings, the proposed defenses can effectively restore safety after harmful degradation without compromising downstream task performance, leading to Safe teleCOMMunication (SafeCOMM) models. In a nutshell, our work serves as a diagnostic study and practical guide for safety realignment in telecom-tuned LLMs, and emphasizes the importance of safety-aware instruction and fine-tuning for real-world deployments of Telecom LLMs.

  • 6 authors
·
May 29, 2025

Chain of Risk: Safety Failures in Large Reasoning Models and Mitigation via Adaptive Multi-Principle Steering

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly expose chain-of-thought-like reasoning for transparency, verification, and deliberate problem solving. This creates a safety blind spot: harmful or policy-violating content may appear in reasoning traces even when final answers appear safe. We test whether final-answer safety is a sufficient proxy for the full reasoning-answer trajectory by scoring both stages under a unified twenty-principle safety rubric. Using prompts from seven public harmfulness and jailbreak sources, plus four out-of-distribution (OOD) sources, we evaluate 15 open-weight and API-based LRMs across 41K prompts per model. Reasoning traces consistently reveal additional safety risks beyond final answers, especially in high-severity stage-wise failures: leak cases, where unsafe reasoning precedes a safe-looking answer, and escape cases, where benign-looking reasoning precedes an unsafe final response. Principle-level analysis shows that risk concentrates in misinformation, legal compliance, discrimination, physical harm, and psychological harm. We further propose adaptive multi-principle steering, a white-box test-time mitigation that learns one unsafe-to-safe activation direction per safety principle and activates only directions whose current hidden state is closer to the unsafe than safe centroid. On three steerable open reasoning models, adaptive steering reduces unsafe counts in both reasoning traces and final answers on held-out and OOD benchmarks. DeepSeek-R1-Qwen-7B achieves a 40.8% average unsafe-count reduction while retaining 97.7% macro-averaged accuracy on BBH, GSM8K, and MMLU. These results suggest that LRM safety should be evaluated and mitigated over the full exposed reasoning-answer trajectory, not only at the final-answer stage.

  • 9 authors
·
May 6

The Cold-Start Safety Gap in LLM Agents

Are tool-calling LLM agents equally safe throughout a conversation? We discover they are not: agents are most vulnerable at the very start of a session and become substantially safer after a few regular agentic tasks -- a phenomenon we term the cold-start safety gap. To study this systematically, we introduce Safety Over Depth for Agents (SODA), a benchmark that controls how many regular agentic tasks the agent completes before encountering a safety threat, supporting up to 20 preceding tasks. Evaluating 7 models from 4 families, safety improves by 9--52% as the number of preceding regular agentic tasks increases from zero to twenty. Representation analysis confirms that model hidden states gradually shift toward a safety-aligned region as more preceding tasks are present. By systematically studying which part of the preceding conversation matters most, we find that the regular agentic tasks themselves are the primary driver of safety, while the agent's own prior responses have less effect on safety but are essential for preserving later utility. This conclusion is further supported by evaluation on open-source safety benchmarks (AgentHarm, Agent Safety Bench) and utility benchmarks (BFCL, API-Bank), confirming that warming up the agent with regular agentic tasks before deployment makes it safer and preserves full capability. Based on these findings, we recommend a simple deployment strategy: having the agent complete a few regular agentic tasks before possible exposure to safety-critical requests mitigates the cold-start safety gap. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-ML-Lab/Agent-Cold-Start-Safety-Gap

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 4 3

SafeKey: Amplifying Aha-Moment Insights for Safety Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce a new generation paradigm of explicitly reasoning before answering, leading to remarkable improvements in complex tasks. However, they pose great safety risks against harmful queries and adversarial attacks. While recent mainstream safety efforts on LRMs, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), improve safety performance, we find that SFT-aligned models struggle to generalize to unseen jailbreak prompts. After thorough investigation of LRMs' generation, we identify a safety aha moment that can activate safety reasoning and lead to a safe response. This aha moment typically appears in the `key sentence', which follows models' query understanding process and can indicate whether the model will proceed safely. Based on these insights, we propose SafeKey, including two complementary objectives to better activate the safety aha moment in the key sentence: (1) a Dual-Path Safety Head to enhance the safety signal in the model's internal representations before the key sentence, and (2) a Query-Mask Modeling objective to improve the models' attention on its query understanding, which has important safety hints. Experiments across multiple safety benchmarks demonstrate that our methods significantly improve safety generalization to a wide range of jailbreak attacks and out-of-distribution harmful prompts, lowering the average harmfulness rate by 9.6\%, while maintaining general abilities. Our analysis reveals how SafeKey enhances safety by reshaping internal attention and improving the quality of hidden representations.

  • 7 authors
·
May 21, 2025 2

Oyster-I: Beyond Refusal -- Constructive Safety Alignment for Responsible Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) typically deploy safety mechanisms to prevent harmful content generation. Most current approaches focus narrowly on risks posed by malicious actors, often framing risks as adversarial events and relying on defensive refusals. However, in real-world settings, risks also come from non-malicious users seeking help while under psychological distress (e.g., self-harm intentions). In such cases, the model's response can strongly influence the user's next actions. Simple refusals may lead them to repeat, escalate, or move to unsafe platforms, creating worse outcomes. We introduce Constructive Safety Alignment (CSA), a human-centric paradigm that protects against malicious misuse while actively guiding vulnerable users toward safe and helpful results. Implemented in Oyster-I (Oy1), CSA combines game-theoretic anticipation of user reactions, fine-grained risk boundary discovery, and interpretable reasoning control, turning safety into a trust-building process. Oy1 achieves state-of-the-art safety among open models while retaining high general capabilities. On our Constructive Benchmark, it shows strong constructive engagement, close to GPT-5, and unmatched robustness on the Strata-Sword jailbreak dataset, nearing GPT-o1 levels. By shifting from refusal-first to guidance-first safety, CSA redefines the model-user relationship, aiming for systems that are not just safe, but meaningfully helpful. We release Oy1, code, and the benchmark to support responsible, user-centered AI.

  • 27 authors
·
Sep 1, 2025

Introducing v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark from MLCommons

This paper introduces v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark, which has been created by the MLCommons AI Safety Working Group. The AI Safety Benchmark has been designed to assess the safety risks of AI systems that use chat-tuned language models. We introduce a principled approach to specifying and constructing the benchmark, which for v0.5 covers only a single use case (an adult chatting to a general-purpose assistant in English), and a limited set of personas (i.e., typical users, malicious users, and vulnerable users). We created a new taxonomy of 13 hazard categories, of which 7 have tests in the v0.5 benchmark. We plan to release version 1.0 of the AI Safety Benchmark by the end of 2024. The v1.0 benchmark will provide meaningful insights into the safety of AI systems. However, the v0.5 benchmark should not be used to assess the safety of AI systems. We have sought to fully document the limitations, flaws, and challenges of v0.5. This release of v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark includes (1) a principled approach to specifying and constructing the benchmark, which comprises use cases, types of systems under test (SUTs), language and context, personas, tests, and test items; (2) a taxonomy of 13 hazard categories with definitions and subcategories; (3) tests for seven of the hazard categories, each comprising a unique set of test items, i.e., prompts. There are 43,090 test items in total, which we created with templates; (4) a grading system for AI systems against the benchmark; (5) an openly available platform, and downloadable tool, called ModelBench that can be used to evaluate the safety of AI systems on the benchmark; (6) an example evaluation report which benchmarks the performance of over a dozen openly available chat-tuned language models; (7) a test specification for the benchmark.

  • 97 authors
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Apr 18, 2024 1

Can't See the Forest for the Trees: Benchmarking Multimodal Safety Awareness for Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded the capabilities of traditional language models by enabling interaction through both text and images. However, ensuring the safety of these models remains a significant challenge, particularly in accurately identifying whether multimodal content is safe or unsafe-a capability we term safety awareness. In this paper, we introduce MMSafeAware, the first comprehensive multimodal safety awareness benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs across 29 safety scenarios with 1500 carefully curated image-prompt pairs. MMSafeAware includes both unsafe and over-safety subsets to assess models abilities to correctly identify unsafe content and avoid over-sensitivity that can hinder helpfulness. Evaluating nine widely used MLLMs using MMSafeAware reveals that current models are not sufficiently safe and often overly sensitive; for example, GPT-4V misclassifies 36.1% of unsafe inputs as safe and 59.9% of benign inputs as unsafe. We further explore three methods to improve safety awareness-prompting-based approaches, visual contrastive decoding, and vision-centric reasoning fine-tuning-but find that none achieve satisfactory performance. Our findings highlight the profound challenges in developing MLLMs with robust safety awareness, underscoring the need for further research in this area. All the code and data will be publicly available to facilitate future research.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 2, 2025

ConceptGuard: Proactive Safety in Text-and-Image-to-Video Generation through Multimodal Risk Detection

Recent progress in video generative models has enabled the creation of high-quality videos from multimodal prompts that combine text and images. While these systems offer enhanced controllability, they also introduce new safety risks, as harmful content can emerge from individual modalities or their interaction. Existing safety methods are often text-only, require prior knowledge of the risk category, or operate as post-generation auditors, struggling to proactively mitigate such compositional, multimodal risks. To address this challenge, we present ConceptGuard, a unified safeguard framework for proactively detecting and mitigating unsafe semantics in multimodal video generation. ConceptGuard operates in two stages: First, a contrastive detection module identifies latent safety risks by projecting fused image-text inputs into a structured concept space; Second, a semantic suppression mechanism steers the generative process away from unsafe concepts by intervening in the prompt's multimodal conditioning. To support the development and rigorous evaluation of this framework, we introduce two novel benchmarks: ConceptRisk, a large-scale dataset for training on multimodal risks, and T2VSafetyBench-TI2V, the first benchmark adapted from T2VSafetyBench for the Text-and-Image-to-Video (TI2V) safety setting. Comprehensive experiments on both benchmarks show that ConceptGuard consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results in both risk detection and safe video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ruize-Ma/ConceptGuard.

  • 10 authors
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Nov 24, 2025

Forbidden Science: Dual-Use AI Challenge Benchmark and Scientific Refusal Tests

The development of robust safety benchmarks for large language models requires open, reproducible datasets that can measure both appropriate refusal of harmful content and potential over-restriction of legitimate scientific discourse. We present an open-source dataset and testing framework for evaluating LLM safety mechanisms across mainly controlled substance queries, analyzing four major models' responses to systematically varied prompts. Our results reveal distinct safety profiles: Claude-3.5-sonnet demonstrated the most conservative approach with 73% refusals and 27% allowances, while Mistral attempted to answer 100% of queries. GPT-3.5-turbo showed moderate restriction with 10% refusals and 90% allowances, and Grok-2 registered 20% refusals and 80% allowances. Testing prompt variation strategies revealed decreasing response consistency, from 85% with single prompts to 65% with five variations. This publicly available benchmark enables systematic evaluation of the critical balance between necessary safety restrictions and potential over-censorship of legitimate scientific inquiry, while providing a foundation for measuring progress in AI safety implementation. Chain-of-thought analysis reveals potential vulnerabilities in safety mechanisms, highlighting the complexity of implementing robust safeguards without unduly restricting desirable and valid scientific discourse.

  • 2 authors
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Feb 7, 2025 2

Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, their integration into interactive environments and tool use introduce new safety challenges beyond those associated with the models themselves. However, the absence of comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating agent safety presents a significant barrier to effective assessment and further improvement. In this paper, we introduce Agent-SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of LLM agents. Agent-SafetyBench encompasses 349 interaction environments and 2,000 test cases, evaluating 8 categories of safety risks and covering 10 common failure modes frequently encountered in unsafe interactions. Our evaluation of 16 popular LLM agents reveals a concerning result: none of the agents achieves a safety score above 60%. This highlights significant safety challenges in LLM agents and underscores the considerable need for improvement. Through quantitative analysis, we identify critical failure modes and summarize two fundamental safety detects in current LLM agents: lack of robustness and lack of risk awareness. Furthermore, our findings suggest that reliance on defense prompts alone is insufficient to address these safety issues, emphasizing the need for more advanced and robust strategies. We release Agent-SafetyBench at https://github.com/thu-coai/Agent-SafetyBench to facilitate further research and innovation in agent safety evaluation and improvement.

  • 7 authors
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Dec 18, 2024 2

GSPR: Aligning LLM Safeguards as Generalizable Safety Policy Reasoners

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into numerous applications across various domains, LLMs' safety becomes a critical concern for both application developers and intended users. Currently, great efforts have been made to develop safety benchmarks with fine-grained taxonomies. However, these benchmarks' taxonomies are disparate with different safety policies. Thus, existing safeguards trained on these benchmarks are either coarse-grained to only distinguish between safe and unsafe, or constrained by the narrow risk taxonomies of a single benchmark. To leverage these fine-grained safety taxonomies across multiple safety benchmarks, in this paper, we propose GSPR, a Generalizable Safety Policy Reasoner to identify unsafe input prompts and LLMs' outputs with violated safety taxonomies through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Unlike prior safeguards which only cover a fixed set of risk factors, our GSPR incentivizes its reasoning capability with varied safety taxonomies through our careful cold-start strategy and reward design. Consequently, our GSPR can be trained across multiple safety benchmarks with distinct taxonomies and naturally exhibits powerful generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our GSPR significantly improves existing safety guardrails' reasoning capabilities for both safety and category prediction tasks. Moreover, our GSPR not only demonstrates powerful safety generalization abilities but also achieves the least inference token costs with explanations.

  • 10 authors
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Sep 29, 2025

R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited great potential in autonomously completing tasks across real-world applications. Despite this, these LLM agents introduce unexpected safety risks when operating in interactive environments. Instead of centering on the harmlessness of LLM-generated content in most prior studies, this work addresses the imperative need for benchmarking the behavioral safety of LLM agents within diverse environments. We introduce R-Judge, a benchmark crafted to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. R-Judge comprises 569 records of multi-turn agent interaction, encompassing 27 key risk scenarios among 5 application categories and 10 risk types. It is of high-quality curation with annotated safety labels and risk descriptions. Evaluation of 11 LLMs on R-Judge shows considerable room for enhancing the risk awareness of LLMs: The best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves 74.42% while no other models significantly exceed the random. Moreover, we reveal that risk awareness in open agent scenarios is a multi-dimensional capability involving knowledge and reasoning, thus challenging for LLMs. With further experiments, we find that fine-tuning on safety judgment significantly improve model performance while straightforward prompting mechanisms fail. R-Judge is publicly available at https://github.com/Lordog/R-Judge.

  • 12 authors
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Oct 4, 2024