Daily Papers

With the development of artificial intelligence, dialogue systems have been endowed with amazing chit-chat capabilities, and there is widespread interest and discussion about whether the generated contents are socially beneficial. In this paper, we present a new perspective of research scope towards building a safe, responsible, and modal dialogue system, including 1) abusive and toxic contents, 2) unfairness and discrimination, 3) ethics and morality issues, and 4) risk of misleading and privacy information. Besides, we review the mainstream methods for evaluating the safety of large models from the perspectives of exposure and detection of safety issues. The recent advances in methodologies for the safety improvement of both end-to-end dialogue systems and pipeline-based models are further introduced. Finally, we discussed six existing challenges towards responsible AI: explainable safety monitoring, continuous learning of safety issues, robustness against malicious attacks, multimodal information processing, unified research framework, and multidisciplinary theory integration. We hope this survey will inspire further research toward safer dialogue systems.

We propose a lightweight explainable guardrail (LEG) method for the classification of unsafe prompts. LEG uses a multi-task learning architecture to jointly learn a prompt classifier and an explanation classifier, where the latter labels prompt words that explain the safe/unsafe overall decision. LEG is trained using synthetic data for explainability, which is generated using a novel strategy that counteracts the confirmation biases of LLMs. Lastly, LEG's training process uses a novel loss that captures global explanation signals and combines cross-entropy and focal losses with uncertainty-based weighting. LEG obtains equivalent or better performance than the state-of-the-art for both prompt classification and explainability, both in-domain and out-of-domain on three datasets, despite the fact that its model size is considerably smaller than current approaches. If accepted, we will release all models and the annotated dataset publicly.

Recent work has highlighted the importance of monitoring chain-of-thought reasoning for AI safety; however, current approaches that analyze textual reasoning steps can miss subtle harmful patterns and may be circumvented by models that hide unsafe reasoning. We present a sentence-level labeled dataset that enables activation-based monitoring of safety behaviors during LLM reasoning. Our dataset contains reasoning sequences with sentence-level annotations of safety behaviors such as expression of safety concerns or speculation on user intent, which we use to extract steering vectors for detecting and influencing these behaviors within model activations. The dataset fills a key gap in safety research: while existing datasets label reasoning holistically, effective application of steering vectors for safety monitoring could be improved by identifying precisely when specific behaviors occur within reasoning chains. We demonstrate the dataset's utility by extracting representations that both detect and steer safety behaviors in model activations, showcasing the potential of activation-level techniques for improving safety oversight on reasoning. Content Warning: This paper discusses AI safety in the context of harmful prompts and may contain references to potentially harmful content.

Modern web dashboards and enterprise applications increasingly rely on complex, distributed microservices architectures. While these architectures offer scalability, they introduce significant challenges in debugging and observability. When failures occur, they often manifest as opaque error messages to the end-user such as Something went wrong. This masks the underlying root cause which may reside in browser side exceptions, API contract violations, or server side logic failures. Existing monitoring tools capture these events in isolation but fail to correlate them effectively or provide intelligible explanations to non technical users. This paper proposes a novel system for Automated Multi Source Debugging and Natural Language Error Explanation. The proposed framework automatically collects and correlates error data from disparate sources such as browser, API, server logs and validates API contracts in real time, and utilizes Large Language Models to generate natural language explanations. This approach significantly reduces Mean Time to Resolution for support engineers and improves the user experience by transforming cryptic error codes into actionable insights.

The safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained increasing attention in recent years, but there still lacks a comprehensive approach for detecting safety issues within LLMs' responses in an aligned, customizable and explainable manner. In this paper, we propose ShieldLM, an LLM-based safety detector, which aligns with general human safety standards, supports customizable detection rules, and provides explanations for its decisions. To train ShieldLM, we compile a large bilingual dataset comprising 14,387 query-response pairs, annotating the safety of responses based on various safety standards. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ShieldLM surpasses strong baselines across four test sets, showcasing remarkable customizability and explainability. Besides performing well on standard detection datasets, ShieldLM has also been shown to be effective in real-world situations as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs. We release ShieldLM at https://github.com/thu-coai/ShieldLM to support accurate and explainable safety detection under various safety standards, contributing to the ongoing efforts to enhance the safety of LLMs.

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.

As the development of Large Models (LMs) progresses rapidly, their safety is also a priority. In current Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) safety workflow, evaluation, diagnosis, and alignment are often handled by separate tools. Specifically, safety evaluation can only locate external behavioral risks but cannot figure out internal root causes. Meanwhile, safety diagnosis often drifts from concrete risk scenarios and remains at the explainable level. In this way, safety alignment lack dedicated explanations of changes in internal mechanisms, potentially degrading general capabilities. To systematically address these issues, we propose an open-source project, namely DeepSight, to practice a new safety evaluation-diagnosis integrated paradigm. DeepSight is low-cost, reproducible, efficient, and highly scalable large-scale model safety evaluation project consisting of a evaluation toolkit DeepSafe and a diagnosis toolkit DeepScan. By unifying task and data protocols, we build a connection between the two stages and transform safety evaluation from black-box to white-box insight. Besides, DeepSight is the first open source toolkit that support the frontier AI risk evaluation and joint safety evaluation and diagnosis.

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.

Industrial Internet of Things environments increasingly rely on advanced Anomaly Detection and explanation techniques to rapidly detect and mitigate cyberincidents, thereby ensuring operational safety. The sequential nature of data collected from these environments has enabled improvements in Anomaly Detection using Machine Learning and Deep Learning models by processing time windows rather than treating the data as tabular. However, conventional explanation methods often neglect this temporal structure, leading to imprecise or less actionable explanations. This work presents ShaTS (Shapley values for Time Series models), which is a model-agnostic explainable Artificial Intelligence method designed to enhance the precision of Shapley value explanations for time series models. ShaTS addresses the shortcomings of traditional approaches by incorporating an a priori feature grouping strategy that preserves temporal dependencies and produces both coherent and actionable insights. Experiments conducted on the SWaT dataset demonstrate that ShaTS accurately identifies critical time instants, precisely pinpoints the sensors, actuators, and processes affected by anomalies, and outperforms SHAP in terms of both explainability and resource efficiency, fulfilling the real-time requirements of industrial environments.

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.

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.

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.

The ideal LLM content moderation system would be both structurally interpretable (so its decisions can be explained to users) and steerable (to reflect a community's values or align to safety standards). However, current systems fall short on both of these dimensions. To address this gap, we present SafetyAnalyst, a novel LLM safety moderation framework. Given a prompt, SafetyAnalyst creates a structured "harm-benefit tree," which identifies 1) the actions that could be taken if a compliant response were provided, 2) the harmful and beneficial effects of those actions (along with their likelihood, severity, and immediacy), and 3) the stakeholders that would be impacted by those effects. It then aggregates this structured representation into a harmfulness score based on a parameterized set of safety preferences, which can be transparently aligned to particular values. Using extensive harm-benefit features generated by SOTA LLMs on 19k prompts, we fine-tuned an open-weight LM to specialize in generating harm-benefit trees through symbolic knowledge distillation. On a comprehensive set of prompt safety benchmarks, we show that our system (average F1=0.75) outperforms existing LLM safety moderation systems (average F1<0.72) on prompt harmfulness classification, while offering the additional advantages of interpretability and steerability.

Ensuring the safety of the Large Language Model (LLM) is critical, but currently used methods in most cases sacrifice the model performance to obtain increased safety or perform poorly on data outside of their adaptation distribution. We investigate existing methods for such generalization and find them insufficient. Surprisingly, while even plain LLMs recognize unsafe prompts, they may still generate unsafe responses. To avoid performance degradation and preserve safe performance, we advocate for a two-step framework, where we first identify unsafe prompts via a lightweight classifier, and apply a "safe" model only to such prompts. In particular, we explore the design of the safety detector in more detail, investigating the use of different classifier architectures and prompting techniques. Interestingly, we find that the final hidden state for the last token is enough to provide robust performance, minimizing false positives on benign data while performing well on malicious prompt detection. Additionally, we show that classifiers trained on the representations from different model layers perform comparably on the latest model layers, indicating that safety representation is present in the LLMs' hidden states at most model stages. Our work is a step towards efficient, representation-based safety mechanisms for LLMs.

With the rise of generative AI and rapid growth of high-quality video generation, video guardrails have become more crucial than ever to ensure safety and security across platforms. Current video guardrails, however, are either overly simplistic, relying on pure classification models trained on simple policies with limited unsafe categories, which lack detailed explanations, or prompting multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with long safety guidelines, which are inefficient and impractical for guardrailing real-world content. To bridge this gap, we propose SafeWatch, an efficient MLLM-based video guardrail model designed to follow customized safety policies and provide multi-label video guardrail outputs with content-specific explanations in a zero-shot manner. In particular, unlike traditional MLLM-based guardrails that encode all safety policies autoregressively, causing inefficiency and bias, SafeWatch uniquely encodes each policy chunk in parallel and eliminates their position bias such that all policies are attended simultaneously with equal importance. In addition, to improve efficiency and accuracy, SafeWatch incorporates a policy-aware visual token pruning algorithm that adaptively selects the most relevant video tokens for each policy, discarding noisy or irrelevant information. This allows for more focused, policy-compliant guardrail with significantly reduced computational overhead. Considering the limitations of existing video guardrail benchmarks, we propose SafeWatch-Bench, a large-scale video guardrail benchmark comprising over 2M videos spanning six safety categories which covers over 30 tasks to ensure a comprehensive coverage of all potential safety scenarios. SafeWatch outperforms SOTA by 28.2% on SafeWatch-Bench, 13.6% on benchmarks, cuts costs by 10%, and delivers top-tier explanations validated by LLM and human reviews.

The increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) across enterprise and mission-critical domains has underscored the urgent need for robust guardrailing systems that ensure safety, reliability, and compliance. Existing solutions often struggle with real-time oversight, multi-modal data handling, and explainability -- limitations that hinder their adoption in regulated environments. Existing guardrails largely operate in isolation, focused on text alone making them inadequate for multi-modal, production-scale environments. We introduce Protect, natively multi-modal guardrailing model designed to operate seamlessly across text, image, and audio inputs, designed for enterprise-grade deployment. Protect integrates fine-tuned, category-specific adapters trained via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on an extensive, multi-modal dataset covering four safety dimensions: toxicity, sexism, data privacy, and prompt injection. Our teacher-assisted annotation pipeline leverages reasoning and explanation traces to generate high-fidelity, context-aware labels across modalities. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all safety dimensions, surpassing existing open and proprietary models such as WildGuard, LlamaGuard-4, and GPT-4.1. Protect establishes a strong foundation for trustworthy, auditable, and production-ready safety systems capable of operating across text, image, and audio modalities.

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/.

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.}

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, safety guardrails are required to go beyond coarse-grained filtering and support fine-grained, interpretable, and adaptable risk assessment. However, existing solutions often rely on rapid classification schemes or post-hoc rules, resulting in limited transparency, inflexible policies, or prohibitive inference costs. To this end, we present YuFeng-XGuard, a reasoning-centric guardrail model family designed to perform multi-dimensional risk perception for LLM interactions. Instead of producing opaque binary judgments, YuFeng-XGuard generates structured risk predictions, including explicit risk categories and configurable confidence scores, accompanied by natural language explanations that expose the underlying reasoning process. This formulation enables safety decisions that are both actionable and interpretable. To balance decision latency and explanatory depth, we adopt a tiered inference paradigm that performs an initial risk decision based on the first decoded token, while preserving ondemand explanatory reasoning when required. In addition, we introduce a dynamic policy mechanism that decouples risk perception from policy enforcement, allowing safety policies to be adjusted without model retraining. Extensive experiments on a diverse set of public safety benchmarks demonstrate that YuFeng-XGuard achieves stateof-the-art performance while maintaining strong efficiency-efficacy trade-offs. We release YuFeng-XGuard as an open model family, including both a full-capacity variant and a lightweight version, to support a wide range of deployment scenarios.

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.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve answer quality through explicit chain-of-thought, yet this very capability introduces new safety risks: harmful content can be subtly injected, surface gradually, or be justified by misleading rationales within the reasoning trace. Existing safety evaluations, however, primarily focus on output-level judgments and rarely capture these dynamic risks along the reasoning process. In this paper, we present SafeRBench, the first benchmark that assesses LRM safety end-to-end -- from inputs and intermediate reasoning to final outputs. (1) Input Characterization: We pioneer the incorporation of risk categories and levels into input design, explicitly accounting for affected groups and severity, and thereby establish a balanced prompt suite reflecting diverse harm gradients. (2) Fine-Grained Output Analysis: We introduce a micro-thought chunking mechanism to segment long reasoning traces into semantically coherent units, enabling fine-grained evaluation across ten safety dimensions. (3) Human Safety Alignment: We validate LLM-based evaluations against human annotations specifically designed to capture safety judgments. Evaluations on 19 LRMs demonstrate that SafeRBench enables detailed, multidimensional safety assessment, offering insights into risks and protective mechanisms from multiple perspectives.

The increasing use of Machine Learning (ML) components embedded in autonomous systems -- so-called Learning-Enabled Systems (LESs) -- has resulted in the pressing need to assure their functional safety. As for traditional functional safety, the emerging consensus within both, industry and academia, is to use assurance cases for this purpose. Typically assurance cases support claims of reliability in support of safety, and can be viewed as a structured way of organising arguments and evidence generated from safety analysis and reliability modelling activities. While such assurance activities are traditionally guided by consensus-based standards developed from vast engineering experience, LESs pose new challenges in safety-critical application due to the characteristics and design of ML models. In this article, we first present an overall assurance framework for LESs with an emphasis on quantitative aspects, e.g., breaking down system-level safety targets to component-level requirements and supporting claims stated in reliability metrics. We then introduce a novel model-agnostic Reliability Assessment Model (RAM) for ML classifiers that utilises the operational profile and robustness verification evidence. We discuss the model assumptions and the inherent challenges of assessing ML reliability uncovered by our RAM and propose solutions to practical use. Probabilistic safety argument templates at the lower ML component-level are also developed based on the RAM. Finally, to evaluate and demonstrate our methods, we not only conduct experiments on synthetic/benchmark datasets but also scope our methods with case studies on simulated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and physical Unmanned Ground Vehicles.

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) has demonstrated broad application potential, yet their safety and reliability remain critical concerns that require systematic exploration. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic safety evaluation of 11 MLRMs across 5 benchmarks and unveil prevalent safety degradation phenomena in most advanced models. Moreover, our analysis reveals distinct safety patterns across different benchmarks: significant safety degradation is observed across jailbreak robustness benchmarks, whereas safety-awareness benchmarks demonstrate less pronounced degradation. In particular, the long thought process in some scenarios even enhances safety performance. Therefore, it is a potential approach to address safety issues in MLRMs by leveraging the intrinsic reasoning capabilities of the model to detect unsafe intent. To operationalize this insight, we construct a multimodal tuning dataset that incorporates a safety-oriented thought process. Experimental results from fine-tuning existing MLRMs with this dataset effectively enhances the safety on both jailbreak robustness and safety-awareness benchmarks. This study provides a new perspective for developing safe MLRMs. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/xinyuelou/Think-in-Safety.

Activation monitoring, which probes a model's internal states using lightweight classifiers, is an emerging tool for AI safety. However, its worst-case robustness under a misalignment threat model--where a model might learn to actively conceal its internal states--remains untested. Focusing on this threat model, we ask: could a model learn to evade previously unseen activation monitors? Our core contribution is to stress-test the learnability of this behavior. We demonstrate that finetuning can create Neural Chameleons: models capable of zero-shot evading activation monitors. Specifically, we fine-tune an LLM to evade monitors for a set of benign concepts (e.g., languages, HTML) when conditioned on a trigger of the form: "You are being probed for {concept}". We show that this learned mechanism generalizes zero-shot: by substituting {concept} with a safety-relevant term like 'deception', the model successfully evades previously unseen safety monitors. We validate this phenomenon across diverse model families (Llama, Gemma, Qwen), showing that the evasion succeeds even against monitors trained post hoc on the model's frozen weights. This evasion is highly selective, targeting only the specific concept mentioned in the trigger, and having a modest impact on model capabilities on standard benchmarks. Using Gemma-2-9b-it as a case study, a mechanistic analysis reveals this is achieved via a targeted manipulation that moves activations into a low-dimensional subspace. While stronger defenses like monitor ensembles and non-linear classifiers show greater resilience, the model retains a non-trivial evasion capability. Our work provides a proof-of-concept for this failure mode and a tool to evaluate the worst-case robustness of monitoring techniques against misalignment threat models.

Current LLM safety defenses fail under decomposition attacks, where a malicious goal is decomposed into benign subtasks that circumvent refusals. The challenge lies in the existing shallow safety alignment techniques: they only detect harm in the immediate prompt and do not reason about long-range intent, leaving them blind to malicious intent that emerges over a sequence of seemingly benign instructions. We therefore propose adding an external monitor that observes the conversation at a higher granularity. To facilitate our study of monitoring decomposition attacks, we curate the largest and most diverse dataset to date, including question-answering, text-to-image, and agentic tasks. We verify our datasets by testing them on frontier LLMs and show an 87% attack success rate on average on GPT-4o. This confirms that decomposition attack is broadly effective. Additionally, we find that random tasks can be injected into the decomposed subtasks to further obfuscate malicious intents. To defend in real time, we propose a lightweight sequential monitoring framework that cumulatively evaluates each subtask. We show that a carefully prompt engineered lightweight monitor achieves a 93% defense success rate, beating reasoning models like o3 mini as a monitor. Moreover, it remains robust against random task injection and cuts cost by 90% and latency by 50%. Our findings suggest that lightweight sequential monitors are highly effective in mitigating decomposition attacks and are viable in deployment.

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.

Modern enterprises generate vast streams of time series metrics when monitoring complex systems, known as observability data. Unlike conventional time series from domains such as weather, observability data are zero-inflated, highly stochastic, and exhibit minimal temporal structure. Despite their importance, observability datasets are underrepresented in public benchmarks due to proprietary restrictions. Existing datasets are often anonymized and normalized, removing scale information and limiting their use for tasks beyond forecasting, such as anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, and multi-modal reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce TelecomTS, a large-scale observability dataset derived from a 5G telecommunications network. TelecomTS features heterogeneous, de-anonymized covariates with explicit scale information and supports a suite of downstream tasks, including anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, and a question-answering benchmark requiring multi-modal reasoning. Benchmarking state-of-the-art time series, language, and reasoning models reveals that existing approaches struggle with the abrupt, noisy, and high-variance dynamics of observability data. Our experiments also underscore the importance of preserving covariates' absolute scale, emphasizing the need for foundation time series models that natively leverage scale information for practical observability applications.

Modern deep learning systems are typically deployed as open-loop function approximators: they map inputs to outputs in a single pass, without regulating how much computation or explanatory effort is spent on a given case. In safety-critical settings, this is brittle: easy and ambiguous inputs receive identical processing, and uncertainty is only read off retrospectively from raw probabilities. We introduce the Surgical Cognitive Interpreter (SCI), a lightweight closed-loop metacognitive control layer that wraps an existing stochastic model and turns prediction into an iterative process. SCI monitors a scalar interpretive state SP(t), here instantiated as a normalized entropy-based confidence signal, and adaptively decides whether to stop, continue sampling, or abstain. The goal is not to improve accuracy per se, but to regulate interpretive error ΔSP and expose a safety signal that tracks when the underlying model is likely to fail. We instantiate SCI around Monte Carlo dropout classifiers in three domains: vision (MNIST digits), medical time series (MIT-BIH arrhythmia), and industrial condition monitoring (rolling-element bearings). In all cases, the controller allocates more inference steps to misclassified inputs than to correct ones (up to about 3-4x on MNIST and bearings, and 1.4x on MIT-BIH). The resulting ΔSP acts as a usable safety signal for detecting misclassifications (AUROC 0.63 on MNIST, 0.70 on MIT-BIH, 0.86 on bearings). Code and reproducibility: https://github.com/vishal-1344/sci

Language models can distinguish between testing and deployment phases -- a capability known as evaluation awareness. This has significant safety and policy implications, potentially undermining the reliability of evaluations that are central to AI governance frameworks and voluntary industry commitments. In this paper, we study evaluation awareness in Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. We show that linear probes can separate real-world evaluation and deployment prompts, suggesting that current models internally represent this distinction. We also find that current safety evaluations are correctly classified by the probes, suggesting that they already appear artificial or inauthentic to models. Our findings underscore the importance of ensuring trustworthy evaluations and understanding deceptive capabilities. More broadly, our work showcases how model internals may be leveraged to support blackbox methods in safety audits, especially for future models more competent at evaluation awareness and deception.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to harmful input compared to their language-only backbones. We investigated this vulnerability by exploring LVLMs internal dynamics, framing their inherent safety understanding in terms of three key capabilities. Specifically, we define these capabilities as safety perception, semantic understanding, and alignment for linguistic expression, and experimentally pinpointed their primary locations within the model architecture. The results indicate that safety perception often emerges before comprehensive semantic understanding, leading to the reduction in safety. Motivated by these findings, we propose Self-Aware Safety Augmentation (SASA), a technique that projects informative semantic representations from intermediate layers onto earlier safety-oriented layers. This approach leverages the model's inherent semantic understanding to enhance safety recognition without fine-tuning. Then, we employ linear probing to articulate the model's internal semantic comprehension to detect the risk before the generation process. Extensive experiments on various datasets and tasks demonstrate that SASA significantly improves the safety of LVLMs, with minimal impact on the utility.

Data-driven companies use AI models extensively to develop products and intelligent business solutions, making the health of these models crucial for business success. Model monitoring and alerting in industries pose unique challenges, including a lack of clear model health metrics definition, label sparsity, and fast model iterations that result in short-lived models and features. As a product, there are also requirements for scalability, generalizability, and explainability. To tackle these challenges, we propose AlerTiger, a deep-learning-based MLOps model monitoring system that helps AI teams across the company monitor their AI models' health by detecting anomalies in models' input features and output score over time. The system consists of four major steps: model statistics generation, deep-learning-based anomaly detection, anomaly post-processing, and user alerting. Our solution generates three categories of statistics to indicate AI model health, offers a two-stage deep anomaly detection solution to address label sparsity and attain the generalizability of monitoring new models, and provides holistic reports for actionable alerts. This approach has been deployed to most of LinkedIn's production AI models for over a year and has identified several model issues that later led to significant business metric gains after fixing.

Open-weights reasoning language models generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) before producing a final response, which improves performance but introduces additional alignment risks, with harmful content often appearing in both the CoTs and the final outputs. In this work, we investigate if we can use CoTs to predict final response misalignment. We evaluate a range of monitoring approaches, including humans, highly-capable large language models, and text classifiers, using either CoT text or activations. First, we find that a simple linear probe trained on CoT activations can significantly outperform all text-based methods in predicting whether a final response will be safe or unsafe. CoT texts are often unfaithful and can mislead humans and classifiers, while model latents (i.e., CoT activations) offer a more reliable predictive signal. Second, the probe makes accurate predictions before reasoning completes, achieving strong performance even when applied to early CoT segments. These findings generalize across model sizes, families, and safety benchmarks, suggesting that lightweight probes could enable real-time safety monitoring and early intervention during generation.

Instruction tuned reasoning models are increasingly deployed with safety classifiers trained on frozen embeddings, assuming representation stability across model updates. We systematically investigate this assumption and find it fails: normalized perturbations of magnitude σ=0.02 (corresponding to approx 1^circ angular drift on the embedding sphere) reduce classifier performance from 85% to 50% ROC-AUC. Critically, mean confidence only drops 14%, producing dangerous silent failures where 72% of misclassifications occur with high confidence, defeating standard monitoring. We further show that instruction-tuned models exhibit 20% worse class separability than base models, making aligned systems paradoxically harder to safeguard. Our findings expose a fundamental fragility in production AI safety architectures and challenge the assumption that safety mechanisms transfer across model versions.

Safety-aligned language models often exhibit fragile and imbalanced safety mechanisms, increasing the likelihood of generating unsafe content. In addition, incorporating new knowledge through editing techniques to language models can further compromise safety. To address these issues, we propose SafeInfer, a context-adaptive, decoding-time safety alignment strategy for generating safe responses to user queries. SafeInfer comprises two phases: the safety amplification phase, which employs safe demonstration examples to adjust the model's hidden states and increase the likelihood of safer outputs, and the safety-guided decoding phase, which influences token selection based on safety-optimized distributions, ensuring the generated content complies with ethical guidelines. Further, we present HarmEval, a novel benchmark for extensive safety evaluations, designed to address potential misuse scenarios in accordance with the policies of leading AI tech giants.

The open-world deployment of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles needs to address a variety of ML vulnerabilities such as interpretability, verifiability, and performance limitations. Research explores different approaches to improve ML dependability by proposing new models and training techniques to reduce generalization error, achieve domain adaptation, and detect outlier examples and adversarial attacks. However, there is a missing connection between ongoing ML research and well-established safety principles. In this paper, we present a structured and comprehensive review of ML techniques to improve the dependability of ML algorithms in uncontrolled open-world settings. From this review, we propose the Taxonomy of ML Safety that maps state-of-the-art ML techniques to key engineering safety strategies. Our taxonomy of ML safety presents a safety-oriented categorization of ML techniques to provide guidance for improving dependability of the ML design and development. The proposed taxonomy can serve as a safety checklist to aid designers in improving coverage and diversity of safety strategies employed in any given ML system.

Safety reasoning is a recent paradigm where LLMs reason over safety policies before generating responses, thereby mitigating limitations in existing safety measures such as over-refusal and jailbreak vulnerabilities. However, implementing this paradigm is challenging due to the resource-intensive process of creating high-quality policy-embedded chain-of-thought (CoT) datasets while ensuring reasoning remains accurate and free from hallucinations or policy conflicts. To tackle this, we propose AIDSAFE: Agentic Iterative Deliberation for Safety Reasoning, a novel data generation recipe that leverages multi-agent deliberation to iteratively expand reasoning on safety policies. A data refiner stage in AIDSAFE ensures high-quality outputs by eliminating repetitive, redundant, and deceptive thoughts. AIDSAFE-generated CoTs provide a strong foundation for supervised fine-tuning (SFT)-based safety training. Additionally, to address the need of preference data in alignment stages, such as DPO training, we introduce a supplemental recipe that uses belief augmentation to create distinct selected and rejected CoT samples. Our evaluations demonstrate that AIDSAFE-generated CoTs achieve superior policy adherence and reasoning quality. Consequently, we show that fine-tuning open-source LLMs on these CoTs can significantly improve safety generalization and jailbreak robustness while maintaining acceptable utility and over-refusal accuracy. AIDSAFE-generated CoT datasets can be found here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/AmazonScience/AIDSAFE

A prerequisite for safe autonomy-in-the-wild is safe testing-in-the-wild. Yet real-world autonomous tests face several unique safety challenges, both due to the possibility of causing harm during a test, as well as the risk of encountering new unsafe agent behavior through interactions with real-world and potentially malicious actors. We propose a framework for conducting safe autonomous agent tests on the open internet: agent actions are audited by a context-sensitive monitor that enforces a stringent safety boundary to stop an unsafe test, with suspect behavior ranked and logged to be examined by humans. We a design a basic safety monitor that is flexible enough to monitor existing LLM agents, and, using an adversarial simulated agent, we measure its ability to identify and stop unsafe situations. Then we apply the safety monitor on a battery of real-world tests of AutoGPT, and we identify several limitations and challenges that will face the creation of safe in-the-wild tests as autonomous agents grow more capable.

The success of large language models (LLMs) in scientific domains has heightened safety concerns, prompting numerous benchmarks to evaluate their scientific safety. Existing benchmarks often suffer from limited risk coverage and a reliance on subjective evaluation. To address these problems, we introduce SafeSci, a comprehensive framework for safety evaluation and enhancement in scientific contexts. SafeSci comprises SafeSciBench, a multi-disciplinary benchmark with 0.25M samples, and SafeSciTrain, a large-scale dataset containing 1.5M samples for safety enhancement. SafeSciBench distinguishes between safety knowledge and risk to cover extensive scopes and employs objective metrics such as deterministically answerable questions to mitigate evaluation bias. We evaluate 24 advanced LLMs, revealing critical vulnerabilities in current models. We also observe that LLMs exhibit varying degrees of excessive refusal behaviors on safety-related issues. For safety enhancement, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on SafeSciTrain significantly enhances the safety alignment of models. Finally, we argue that knowledge is a double-edged sword, and determining the safety of a scientific question should depend on specific context, rather than universally categorizing it as safe or unsafe. Our work provides both a diagnostic tool and a practical resource for building safer scientific AI systems.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, yet their expanded modality space introduces new compositional safety risks that emerge from complex text-image interactions. Such cross-modal couplings can produce unsafe semantics even when individual inputs are benign, exposing the fragile safety awareness of current MLLMs. While recent works enhance safety by guiding models to reason about potential risks, unregulated reasoning traces may compromise alignment; although Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) offers self-rewarded refinement without human supervision, it lacks verifiable signals for reasoning safety. To address this, we propose SafeGRPO a self-rewarded multimodal safety alignment framework that integrates rule-governed reward construction into GRPO, enabling interpretable and verifiable optimization of reasoning safety. Built upon the constructed SafeTag-VL-3K dataset with explicit visual, textual, and combined safety tags, SafeGRPO performs step-guided safety thinking to enforce structured reasoning and behavior alignment, substantially improving multimodal safety awareness, compositional robustness, and reasoning stability across diverse benchmarks without sacrificing general capabilities.

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.

As LLMs increasingly impact safety-critical applications, ensuring their safety using guardrails remains a key challenge. This paper proposes GuardReasoner, a new safeguard for LLMs, by guiding the guard model to learn to reason. Concretely, we first create the GuardReasonerTrain dataset, which consists of 127K samples with 460K detailed reasoning steps. Then, we introduce reasoning SFT to unlock the reasoning capability of guard models. In addition, we present hard sample DPO to further strengthen their reasoning ability. In this manner, GuardReasoner achieves better performance, explainability, and generalizability. Extensive experiments and analyses on 13 benchmarks of 3 guardrail tasks demonstrate its superiority. Remarkably, GuardReasoner 8B surpasses GPT-4o+CoT by 5.74% and LLaMA Guard 3 8B by 20.84% F1 score on average. We release the training data, code, and models with different scales (1B, 3B, 8B) of GuardReasoner : https://github.com/yueliu1999/GuardReasoner/.

Large language models (LLMs), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety alignment. Current safety alignment methods often result in superficial refusal shortcuts or rely on intensive supervision for reasoning-based approaches, failing to fully leverage the model's intrinsic safety self-awareness. We propose AlphaAlign, a simple yet effective pure reinforcement learning (RL) framework with verifiable safety reward designed to incentivize this latent safety awareness through proactive safety reasoning.} AlphaAlign employs a dual-reward system: a verifiable safety reward encourages correctly formatted and explicitly justified refusals for harmful queries while penalizing over-refusals, and a normalized helpfulness reward guides high-quality responses to benign inputs. This allows the model to develop proactive safety reasoning capabilities without depending on supervised safety-specific reasoning data. AlphaAlign demonstrates three key advantages: (1) Simplicity and efficiency, requiring only binary prompt safety labels and minimal RL steps for substantial improvements. (2) Breaking the safety-utility trade-off, by enhancing refusal of harmful content and reducing over-refusals, while simultaneously maintaining or even improving general task performance and robustness to unseen jailbreaks. (3) Deep alignment, fostering proactive safety reasoning that generates explicit safety rationales rather than relying on shallow refusal patterns.

Increasingly sophisticated mathematical modelling processes from Machine Learning are being used to analyse complex data. However, the performance and explainability of these models within practical critical systems requires a rigorous and continuous verification of their safe utilisation. Working towards addressing this challenge, this paper presents a principled novel safety argument framework for critical systems that utilise deep neural networks. The approach allows various forms of predictions, e.g., future reliability of passing some demands, or confidence on a required reliability level. It is supported by a Bayesian analysis using operational data and the recent verification and validation techniques for deep learning. The prediction is conservative -- it starts with partial prior knowledge obtained from lifecycle activities and then determines the worst-case prediction. Open challenges are also identified.

Case-based reasoning networks are machine-learning models that make predictions based on similarity between the input and prototypical parts of training samples, called prototypes. Such models are able to explain each decision by pointing to the prototypes that contributed the most to the final outcome. As the explanation is a core part of the prediction, they are often qualified as ``interpretable by design". While promising, we show that such explanations are sometimes misleading, which hampers their usefulness in safety-critical contexts. In particular, several instances may lead to different predictions and yet have the same explanation. Drawing inspiration from the field of formal eXplainable AI (FXAI), we propose Abductive Latent Explanations (ALEs), a formalism to express sufficient conditions on the intermediate (latent) representation of the instance that imply the prediction. Our approach combines the inherent interpretability of case-based reasoning models and the guarantees provided by formal XAI. We propose a solver-free and scalable algorithm for generating ALEs based on three distinct paradigms, compare them, and present the feasibility of our approach on diverse datasets for both standard and fine-grained image classification. The associated code can be found at https://github.com/julsoria/ale

The deployment of autonomous AI agents in sensitive domains, such as healthcare, introduces critical risks to safety, security, and privacy. These agents may deviate from user objectives, violate data handling policies, or be compromised by adversarial attacks. Mitigating these dangers necessitates a mechanism to formally guarantee that an agent's actions adhere to predefined safety constraints, a challenge that existing systems do not fully address. We introduce VeriGuard, a novel framework that provides formal safety guarantees for LLM-based agents through a dual-stage architecture designed for robust and verifiable correctness. The initial offline stage involves a comprehensive validation process. It begins by clarifying user intent to establish precise safety specifications. VeriGuard then synthesizes a behavioral policy and subjects it to both testing and formal verification to prove its compliance with these specifications. This iterative process refines the policy until it is deemed correct. Subsequently, the second stage provides online action monitoring, where VeriGuard operates as a runtime monitor to validate each proposed agent action against the pre-verified policy before execution. This separation of the exhaustive offline validation from the lightweight online monitoring allows formal guarantees to be practically applied, providing a robust safeguard that substantially improves the trustworthiness of LLM agents.

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.

Emerging large reasoning models (LRMs), such as DeepSeek-R1 models, leverage long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to generate structured intermediate steps, enhancing their reasoning capabilities. However, long CoT does not inherently guarantee safe outputs, potentially leading to harmful consequences such as the introduction of security vulnerabilities in code or the spread of misinformation. Current research on large language model (LLM) safety usually focuses on short-answer responses, overlooking the long CoT style outputs of LRMs. To bridge this gap, we conduct a systematic study of LRM safety. First, we investigate safety evaluators calibrated against human annotations. Using our newly developed metrics, we thoroughly assess the safety of 12 state-of-the-art LRMs on StrongReject and WildJailbreak datasets. Our results show that LRMs are not safe compared to their reasoning advance. Further, we perform a fine-grained analysis of the reasoning trace and final answer. We find that three decoding strategies-ZeroThink, LessThink, and MoreThink-can improve model safety without additional training. However, these strategies either use constrained reasoning traces or incur high inference costs. To better strengthen LRM safety, we introduce SafeChain, the first-of-its-kind safety training dataset in CoT style. We fine-tune two LRMs with SafeChain, showing that it not only enhances model safety but also preserves performance across 6 reasoning benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional capabilities across various tasks but also pose risks by generating harmful content. Existing safety mechanisms, while improving model safety, often lead to overly cautious behavior and fail to fully leverage LLMs' internal cognitive processes. Inspired by humans' reflective thinking capability, we first show that LLMs can similarly perform internal assessments about safety in their internal states. Building on this insight, we propose SafeSwitch, a dynamic framework that regulates unsafe outputs by utilizing the prober-based internal state monitor that actively detects harmful intentions, and activates a safety head that leads to safer and more conservative responses only when necessary. SafeSwitch reduces harmful outputs by approximately 80% on harmful queries while maintaining strong utility, reaching a Pareto optimal among several methods. Our method is also advantageous over traditional methods in offering more informative, context-aware refusals, and achieves these benefits while only tuning less than 6% of the original parameters. SafeSwitch demonstrates large language models' capacity for self-awareness and reflection regarding safety, offering a promising approach to more nuanced and effective safety controls. Codes for this work are available at https://github.com/Hanpx20/SafeSwitch.

Computer-using agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like capabilities in operating digital environments like mobile platforms. While these agents hold great promise for advancing digital automation, their potential for unsafe operations, such as system compromise and privacy leakage, is raising significant concerns. Detecting these safety concerns across the vast and complex operational space of mobile environments presents a formidable challenge that remains critically underexplored. To establish a foundation for mobile agent safety research, we introduce MobileRisk-Live, a dynamic sandbox environment accompanied by a safety detection benchmark comprising realistic trajectories with fine-grained annotations. Built upon this, we propose OS-Sentinel, a novel hybrid safety detection framework that synergistically combines a Formal Verifier for detecting explicit system-level violations with a VLM-based Contextual Judge for assessing contextual risks and agent actions. Experiments show that OS-Sentinel achieves 10%-30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. Further analysis provides critical insights that foster the development of safer and more reliable autonomous mobile agents.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces new safety risks, as unsafe behaviors often emerge within intermediate reasoning trajectories, even when final answers appear harmless. Existing safety alignment approaches primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over safety-oriented long CoT datasets. While intuitive, we find that SFT produces inconsistent safety improvements, degrades reasoning ability, and generalizes poorly across model families. These limitations suggest that purely supervised approaches are insufficient for robust safety alignment in LRMs. To address this, we investigate reinforcement learning (RL) as a complementary optimization framework for LRM safety training. Unlike SFT, RL directly optimizes model policies with reward feedback, enabling more adaptive and stable alignment. Extensive experiments across multiple model families and benchmarks show that RL achieves stronger and more consistent safety gains while maintaining reasoning competence. Further analysis of reflection dynamics and token-level entropy reveals that RL suppresses unsafe exploratory reasoning while preserving reflective depth, leading to safer and more reliable reasoning processes.

Though safety alignment has been applied to most large language models (LLMs), LLM service providers generally deploy a subsequent moderation as the external safety guardrail in real-world products. Existing moderators mainly practice a conventional full detection, which determines the harmfulness based on the complete LLM output, causing high service latency. Recent works pay more attention to partial detection where moderators oversee the generation midway and early stop the output if harmfulness is detected, but they directly apply moderators trained with the full detection paradigm to incomplete outputs, introducing a training-inference gap that lowers the performance. In this paper, we explore how to form a data-and-model solution that natively supports partial detection. For the data, we construct FineHarm, a dataset consisting of 29K prompt-response pairs with fine-grained annotations to provide reasonable supervision for token-level training. Then, we propose the streaming content monitor, which is trained with dual supervision of response- and token-level labels and can follow the output stream of LLM to make a timely judgment of harmfulness. Experiments show that SCM gains 0.95+ in macro F1 score that is comparable to full detection, by only seeing the first 18% of tokens in responses on average. Moreover, the SCM can serve as a pseudo-harmfulness annotator for improving safety alignment and lead to a higher harmlessness score than DPO.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications requires robust safety guard models to detect and block harmful user prompts. While large safety guard models achieve strong performance, their computational cost is substantial. To mitigate this, smaller distilled models are used, but they often underperform on "hard" examples where the larger model provides accurate predictions. We observe that many inputs can be reliably handled by the smaller model, while only a small fraction require the larger model's capacity. Motivated by this, we propose SafeRoute, a binary router that distinguishes hard examples from easy ones. Our method selectively applies the larger safety guard model to the data that the router considers hard, improving efficiency while maintaining accuracy compared to solely using the larger safety guard model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our adaptive model selection significantly enhances the trade-off between computational cost and safety performance, outperforming relevant baselines.

Although Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have progressed in solving complex problems, their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often contains harmful content that can persist even when the final responses appear safe. We show that this issue still remains in existing methods which overlook the unique significance of safe reasoning, undermining their trustworthiness and posing potential risks in applications if unsafe reasoning is accessible for and exploited by malicious users. We therefore shift our focus to aligning the safety of reasoning itself in this paper and explore process supervision as the solution. However, simply rewarding safe reasoning proves inadequate due to low rollout diversity and limited training signals. To tackle this challenge, we first delve into the characteristics of safe reasoning and uncover several critical insights that 1) safe reasoning is often consolidated by a few critical steps of safety triggers; 2) compliance cues strongly correlate with unsafe continuations; and 3) corrective interventions reliably steer unsafe trajectories towards safer traces. Motivated by these, we propose Intervened Preference Optimization (IPO), an alignment method that enforces safe reasoning by substituting compliance steps with safety triggers and constructing pairs for preference learning with strong signals. Experiments on jailbreak and adversarial safety benchmarks demonstrate that IPO remarkably improves overall safety regarding both reasoning and responses, outperforming SFT-based and RL-based baselines with a relative reduction of over 30% in harmfulness, while preserving excellent performance across diverse reasoning tasks. The results highlight the importance of explicit alignment for reasoning and provide a practical path to safer LRMs.

As autonomous AI agents are used in regulated and safety-critical settings, organizations need effective ways to turn policy into enforceable controls. We introduce a regulatory machine learning framework that converts unstructured design artifacts (like PRDs, TDDs, and code) into verifiable runtime guardrails. Our Policy as Prompt method reads these documents and risk controls to build a source-linked policy tree. This tree is then compiled into lightweight, prompt-based classifiers for real-time runtime monitoring. The system is built to enforce least privilege and data minimization. For conformity assessment, it provides complete provenance, traceability, and audit logging, all integrated with a human-in-the-loop review process. Evaluations show our system reduces prompt-injection risk, blocks out-of-scope requests, and limits toxic outputs. It also generates auditable rationales aligned with AI governance frameworks. By treating policies as executable prompts (a policy-as-code for agents), this approach enables secure-by-design deployment, continuous compliance, and scalable AI safety and AI security assurance for regulatable ML.

Ensuring the safety and compliance of large language models (LLMs) is of paramount importance. However, existing LLM safety datasets often rely on ad-hoc taxonomies for data generation and suffer from a significant shortage of rule-grounded, real-world cases that are essential for robustly protecting LLMs. In this work, we address this critical gap by constructing a comprehensive safety dataset from a compliance perspective. Using a powerful web-searching agent, we collect a rule-grounded, real-world case dataset OmniCompliance-100K, sourced from multi-domain authoritative references. The dataset spans 74 regulations and policies across a wide range of domains, including security and privacy regulations, content safety and user data privacy policies from leading AI companies and social media platforms, financial security requirements, medical device risk management standards, educational integrity guidelines, and protections of fundamental human rights. In total, our dataset contains 12,985 distinct rules and 106,009 associated real-world compliance cases. Our analysis confirms a strong alignment between the rules and their corresponding cases. We further conduct extensive benchmarking experiments to evaluate the safety and compliance capabilities of advanced LLMs across different model scales. Our experiments reveal several interesting findings that have great potential to offer valuable insights for future LLM safety research.

This paper introduces STAR-1, a high-quality, just-1k-scale safety dataset specifically designed for large reasoning models (LRMs) like DeepSeek-R1. Built on three core principles -- diversity, deliberative reasoning, and rigorous filtering -- STAR-1 aims to address the critical needs for safety alignment in LRMs. Specifically, we begin by integrating existing open-source safety datasets from diverse sources. Then, we curate safety policies to generate policy-grounded deliberative reasoning samples. Lastly, we apply a GPT-4o-based safety scoring system to select training examples aligned with best practices. Experimental results show that fine-tuning LRMs with STAR-1 leads to an average 40% improvement in safety performance across four benchmarks, while only incurring a marginal decrease (e.g., an average of 1.1%) in reasoning ability measured across five reasoning tasks. Extensive ablation studies further validate the importance of our design principles in constructing STAR-1 and analyze its efficacy across both LRMs and traditional LLMs. Our project page is https://ucsc-vlaa.github.io/STAR-1.

Recent work by Anthropic on Mechanistic interpretability claims to understand and control Large Language Models by extracting human-interpretable features from their neural activation patterns using sparse autoencoders (SAEs). If successful, this approach offers one of the most promising routes for human oversight in AI safety. We conduct an initial stress-test of these claims by replicating their main results with open-source SAEs for Llama 3.1. While we successfully reproduce basic feature extraction and steering capabilities, our investigation suggests that major caution is warranted regarding the generalizability of these claims. We find that feature steering exhibits substantial fragility, with sensitivity to layer selection, steering magnitude, and context. We observe non-standard activation behavior and demonstrate the difficulty to distinguish thematically similar features from one another. While SAE-based interpretability produces compelling demonstrations in selected cases, current methods often fall short of the systematic reliability required for safety-critical applications. This suggests a necessary shift in focus from prioritizing interpretability of internal representations toward reliable prediction and control of model output. Our work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what mechanistic interpretability has achieved and highlights fundamental challenges for AI safety that remain unresolved.

As large reasoning models (LRMs) grow more capable, chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning introduces new safety challenges. Existing SFT-based safety alignment studies dominantly focused on filtering prompts with safe, high-quality responses, while overlooking hard prompts that always elicit harmful outputs. To fill this gap, we introduce UnsafeChain, a safety alignment dataset constructed from hard prompts with diverse sources, where unsafe completions are identified and explicitly corrected into safe responses. By exposing models to unsafe behaviors and guiding their correction, UnsafeChain enhances safety while preserving general reasoning ability. We fine-tune three LRMs on UnsafeChain and compare them against recent SafeChain and STAR-1 across six out-of-distribution and five in-distribution benchmarks. UnsafeChain consistently outperforms prior datasets, with even a 1K subset matching or surpassing baseline performance, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of correction-based supervision. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/UnsafeChain

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is a widely adopted approach, but it often leads to safety degradation in safety-aligned LLMs. Currently, many solutions address this issue by incorporating additional safety data, which can be impractical in many cases. In this paper, we address the question: How can we improve downstream task performance while preserving safety in LLMs without relying on additional safety data? We propose a simple and effective method that maintains the inherent safety of LLMs while enhancing their downstream task performance: merging the weights of pre- and post-fine-tuned safety-aligned models. Experimental results across various downstream tasks, models, and merging methods demonstrate that this approach effectively mitigates safety degradation while improving downstream task performance, offering a practical solution for adapting safety-aligned LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly paired with activation-based monitoring to detect and prevent harmful behaviors that may not be apparent at the surface-text level. However, existing activation safety approaches, trained on broad misuse datasets, struggle with poor precision, limited flexibility, and lack of interpretability. This paper introduces a new paradigm: rule-based activation safety, inspired by rule-sharing practices in cybersecurity. We propose modeling activations as cognitive elements (CEs), fine-grained, interpretable factors such as ''making a threat'' and ''payment processing'', that can be composed to capture nuanced, domain-specific behaviors with higher precision. Building on this representation, we present a practical framework that defines predicate rules over CEs and detects violations in real time. This enables practitioners to configure and update safeguards without retraining models or detectors, while supporting transparency and auditability. Our results show that compositional rule-based activation safety improves precision, supports domain customization, and lays the groundwork for scalable, interpretable, and auditable AI governance. We will release GAVEL as an open-source framework and provide an accompanying automated rule creation tool.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, the risk of generating harmful or toxic content remains a central challenge. Post-hoc alignment methods are brittle: once unsafe patterns are learned during pretraining, they are hard to remove. We present a data-centric pretraining framework that builds safety into the model from the start. Our contributions include: (i) a safety classifier trained on 10,000 GPT-4 labeled examples, used to filter 600B tokens; (ii) the largest synthetic safety dataset to date (100B tokens) generated via recontextualization of harmful web data; (iii) RefuseWeb and Moral Education datasets that convert harmful prompts into refusal dialogues and web-style educational material; (iv) Harmfulness-Tag annotations injected during pretraining to flag unsafe content and steer away inference from harmful generations; and (v) safety evaluations measuring base model behavior before instruction tuning. Our safety-pretrained models reduce attack success rates from 38.8% to 8.4% with no performance degradation on standard LLM safety benchmarks.

As Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) becomes increasingly integrated into various facets of human life, ensuring the safety and ethical alignment of such systems is paramount. Previous studies primarily focus on single-modality threats, which may not suffice given the integrated and complex nature of cross-modality interactions. We introduce a novel safety alignment challenge called Safe Inputs but Unsafe Output (SIUO) to evaluate cross-modality safety alignment. Specifically, it considers cases where single modalities are safe independently but could potentially lead to unsafe or unethical outputs when combined. To empirically investigate this problem, we developed the SIUO, a cross-modality benchmark encompassing 9 critical safety domains, such as self-harm, illegal activities, and privacy violations. Our findings reveal substantial safety vulnerabilities in both closed- and open-source LVLMs, such as GPT-4V and LLaVA, underscoring the inadequacy of current models to reliably interpret and respond to complex, real-world scenarios.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has revolutionized code generation, enabling unprecedented productivity through promptware and autonomous AI agents. However, this transformation introduces significant risks, including insecure code generation, hallucinated outputs, irreversible actions, and a lack of transparency and accountability. Incidents like the Replit database deletion underscore the urgent need for robust safety and governance mechanisms. This paper comprehensively analyzes the inherent challenges of LLM-assisted code generation, such as vulnerability inheritance, overtrust, misinterpretation, and the absence of standardized validation and rollback protocols. To address these, we propose the SAFE-AI Framework, a holistic approach emphasizing Safety, Auditability, Feedback, and Explainability. The framework integrates guardrails, sandboxing, runtime verification, risk-aware logging, human-in-the-loop systems, and explainable AI techniques to mitigate risks while fostering trust and compliance. We introduce a novel taxonomy of AI behaviors categorizing suggestive, generative, autonomous, and destructive actions to guide risk assessment and oversight. Additionally, we identify open problems, including the lack of standardized benchmarks for code specific hallucinations and autonomy levels, and propose future research directions for hybrid verification, semantic guardrails, and proactive governance tools. Through detailed comparisons of autonomy control, prompt engineering, explainability, and governance frameworks, this paper provides a roadmap for responsible AI integration in software engineering, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and Canada's AIDA to ensure safe, transparent, and accountable AI-driven development.

Ensuring the reliability and availability of complex networked services demands effective root cause analysis (RCA) across cloud environments, data centers, and on-premises networks. Traditional RCA methods, which involve manual inspection of data sources such as logs and telemetry data, are often time-consuming and challenging for on-call engineers. While statistical inference methods have been employed to estimate the causality of network events, these approaches alone are similarly challenging and suffer from a lack of interpretability, making it difficult for engineers to understand the predictions made by black-box models. In this paper, we present RCACopilot, an advanced on-call system that combines statistical tests and large language model (LLM) reasoning to automate RCA across various network environments. RCACopilot gathers and synthesizes critical runtime diagnostic information, predicts the root cause of incidents, provides a clear explanatory narrative, and offers targeted action steps for engineers to resolve the issues. By utilizing LLM reasoning techniques and retrieval, RCACopilot delivers accurate and practical support for operators.

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has intensified the requirement for reliable safety evaluation to uncover model vulnerabilities. To this end, numerous LLM safety evaluation benchmarks are proposed. However, existing benchmarks generally rely on labor-intensive manual curation, which causes excessive time and resource consumption. They also exhibit significant redundancy and limited difficulty. To alleviate these problems, we introduce SafetyFlow, the first agent-flow system designed to automate the construction of LLM safety benchmarks. SafetyFlow can automatically build a comprehensive safety benchmark in only four days without any human intervention by orchestrating seven specialized agents, significantly reducing time and resource cost. Equipped with versatile tools, the agents of SafetyFlow ensure process and cost controllability while integrating human expertise into the automatic pipeline. The final constructed dataset, SafetyFlowBench, contains 23,446 queries with low redundancy and strong discriminative power. Our contribution includes the first fully automated benchmarking pipeline and a comprehensive safety benchmark. We evaluate the safety of 49 advanced LLMs on our dataset and conduct extensive experiments to validate our efficacy and efficiency.

Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) demonstrate impressive cross-modal reasoning but often amplify safety risks under adversarial or unsafe prompts, a phenomenon we call the Reasoning Tax. Existing defenses mainly act at the output level and do not constrain the reasoning process, leaving models exposed to implicit risks. In this paper, we propose SaFeR-VLM, a safety-aligned reinforcement learning framework that embeds safety directly into multimodal reasoning. The framework integrates four components: (I) QI-Safe-10K, a curated dataset emphasizing safety-critical and reasoning-sensitive cases; (II) safety-aware rollout, where unsafe generations undergo reflection and correction instead of being discarded; (III) structured reward modeling with multi-dimensional weighted criteria and explicit penalties for hallucinations and contradictions; and (IV) GRPO optimization, which reinforces both safe and corrected trajectories. This unified design shifts safety from a passive safeguard to an active driver of reasoning, enabling scalable and generalizable safety-aware reasoning. SaFeR-VLM further demonstrates robustness against both explicit and implicit risks, supporting dynamic and interpretable safety decisions beyond surface-level filtering. SaFeR-VLM-3B achieves average performance 70.13 and 78.97 on safety and helpfulness across six benchmarks, surpassing both same-scale and >10times larger models such as Skywork-R1V3-38B, Qwen2.5VL-72B, and GLM4.5V-106B. Remarkably, SaFeR-VLM-7B benefits from its increased scale to surpass GPT-5-mini and Gemini-2.5-Flash by 6.47 and 16.76 points respectively on safety metrics, achieving this improvement without any degradation in helpfulness performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HarveyYi/SaFeR-VLM.

Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) are increasingly deployed for vision-language tasks that produce explicit intermediate rationales. However, reasoning traces can contain unsafe content even when the final answer is non-harmful, creating deployment risks. Existing multimodal safety guards primarily evaluate only the input question and the final answer, neglecting the intermediate reasoning process. This oversight allows undetected harm, such as biased inferences or policy-violating use of visual context, to emerge during reasoning. We introduce GuardTrace-VL, a vision-aware safety auditor that monitors the full Question-Thinking-Answer (QTA) pipeline via joint image-text analysis, enabling detection of unsafe content as it emerges in the reasoning stage. To support training and evaluation, we construct the GuardTrace dataset, which is generated through diverse prompting strategies and refined via a MLRM- and human-based voting and verification pipeline. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage progressive training scheme combined with the data refinement process, enabling the model to learn nuanced and context-dependent safety preferences according to different risk levels. On our proposed test set covering both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios, GuardTrace-VL model achieves an F1 score of 93.1% on unsafe reasoning detection tasks, representing a 13.5% improvement in F1 score compared to the previous strongest multimodal safety defense methods. The codes will be made publicly available.

Machine learning (ML) systems are rapidly increasing in size, are acquiring new capabilities, and are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings. As with other powerful technologies, safety for ML should be a leading research priority. In response to emerging safety challenges in ML, such as those introduced by recent large-scale models, we provide a new roadmap for ML Safety and refine the technical problems that the field needs to address. We present four problems ready for research, namely withstanding hazards ("Robustness"), identifying hazards ("Monitoring"), reducing inherent model hazards ("Alignment"), and reducing systemic hazards ("Systemic Safety"). Throughout, we clarify each problem's motivation and provide concrete research directions.

The usage of deep neural networks in safety-critical systems is limited by our ability to guarantee their correct behavior. Runtime monitors are components aiming to identify unsafe predictions and discard them before they can lead to catastrophic consequences. Several recent works on runtime monitoring have focused on out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, i.e., identifying inputs that are different from the training data. In this work, we argue that OOD detection is not a well-suited framework to design efficient runtime monitors and that it is more relevant to evaluate monitors based on their ability to discard incorrect predictions. We call this setting out-ofmodel-scope detection and discuss the conceptual differences with OOD. We also conduct extensive experiments on popular datasets from the literature to show that studying monitors in the OOD setting can be misleading: 1. very good OOD results can give a false impression of safety, 2. comparison under the OOD setting does not allow identifying the best monitor to detect errors. Finally, we also show that removing erroneous training data samples helps to train better monitors.

We present LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. LaMDA is a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, which have up to 137B parameters and are pre-trained on 1.56T words of public dialog data and web text. While model scaling alone can improve quality, it shows less improvements on safety and factual grounding. We demonstrate that fine-tuning with annotated data and enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources can lead to significant improvements towards the two key challenges of safety and factual grounding. The first challenge, safety, involves ensuring that the model's responses are consistent with a set of human values, such as preventing harmful suggestions and unfair bias. We quantify safety using a metric based on an illustrative set of human values, and we find that filtering candidate responses using a LaMDA classifier fine-tuned with a small amount of crowdworker-annotated data offers a promising approach to improving model safety. The second challenge, factual grounding, involves enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources, such as an information retrieval system, a language translator, and a calculator. We quantify factuality using a groundedness metric, and we find that our approach enables the model to generate responses grounded in known sources, rather than responses that merely sound plausible. Finally, we explore the use of LaMDA in the domains of education and content recommendations, and analyze their helpfulness and role consistency.

Ensuring the safety of large language models (LLMs) is critical as they are deployed in real-world applications. Existing guardrails rely on rule-based filtering or single-pass classification, limiting their ability to handle nuanced safety violations. To address this, we propose ThinkGuard, a critique-augmented guardrail model that distills knowledge from high-capacity LLMs by generating structured critiques alongside safety labels. Fine-tuned on critique-augmented data, the captured deliberative thinking ability drastically enhances the guardrail's cautiousness and interpretability. Evaluated on multiple safety benchmarks, ThinkGuard achieves the highest average F1 and AUPRC, outperforming all baselines. Compared to LLaMA Guard 3, ThinkGuard improves accuracy by 16.1% and macro F1 by 27.0%. Moreover, it surpasses label-only fine-tuned models, confirming that structured critiques enhance both classification precision and nuanced safety reasoning while maintaining computational efficiency.

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.

The current paradigm for safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) follows a one-size-fits-all approach: the model refuses to interact with any content deemed unsafe by the model provider. This approach lacks flexibility in the face of varying social norms across cultures and regions. In addition, users may have diverse safety needs, making a model with static safety standards too restrictive to be useful, as well as too costly to be re-aligned. We propose Controllable Safety Alignment (CoSA), a framework designed to adapt models to diverse safety requirements without re-training. Instead of aligning a fixed model, we align models to follow safety configs -- free-form natural language descriptions of the desired safety behaviors -- that are provided as part of the system prompt. To adjust model safety behavior, authorized users only need to modify such safety configs at inference time. To enable that, we propose CoSAlign, a data-centric method for aligning LLMs to easily adapt to diverse safety configs. Furthermore, we devise a novel controllability evaluation protocol that considers both helpfulness and configured safety, summarizing them into CoSA-Score, and construct CoSApien, a human-authored benchmark that consists of real-world LLM use cases with diverse safety requirements and corresponding evaluation prompts. We show that CoSAlign leads to substantial gains of controllability over strong baselines including in-context alignment. Our framework encourages better representation and adaptation to pluralistic human values in LLMs, and thereby increasing their practicality.

Concept-based explanation methods, such as Concept Activation Vectors, are potent means to quantify how abstract or high-level characteristics of input data influence the predictions of complex deep neural networks. However, applying them to industrial prediction problems is challenging as it is not immediately clear how to define and access appropriate concepts for individual use cases and specific data types. In this work, we investigate how to leverage established concept-based explanation techniques in the context of bearing fault detection with deep neural networks trained on vibration signals. Since bearings are prevalent in almost every rotating equipment, ensuring the reliability of intransparent fault detection models is crucial to prevent costly repairs and downtimes of industrial machinery. Our evaluations demonstrate that explaining opaque models in terms of vibration concepts enables human-comprehensible and intuitive insights about their inner workings, but the underlying assumptions need to be carefully validated first.

Accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction hinges on the quality of health indicators (HIs), yet existing methods often fail to disentangle complex degradation mechanisms in multi-sensor systems or quantify uncertainty in HI reliability. This paper introduces a novel framework for HI construction, advancing three key contributions. First, we adapt Reconstruction along Projected Pathways (RaPP) as a health indicator (HI) for RUL prediction for the first time, showing that it outperforms traditional reconstruction error metrics. Second, we show that augmenting RaPP-derived HIs with aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) via Monte Carlo dropout and probabilistic latent spaces- significantly improves RUL-prediction robustness. Third, and most critically, we propose indicator groups, a paradigm that isolates sensor subsets to model system-specific degradations, giving rise to our novel method, I-GLIDE which enables interpretable, mechanism-specific diagnostics. Evaluated on data sourced from aerospace and manufacturing systems, our approach achieves marked improvements in accuracy and generalizability compared to state-of-the-art HI methods while providing actionable insights into system failure pathways. This work bridges the gap between anomaly detection and prognostics, offering a principled framework for uncertainty-aware degradation modeling in complex systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly sophisticated, leading to widespread deployment in sensitive applications where safety and reliability are paramount. However, LLMs have inherent risks accompanying them, including bias, potential for unsafe actions, dataset poisoning, lack of explainability, hallucinations, and non-reproducibility. These risks necessitate the development of "guardrails" to align LLMs with desired behaviors and mitigate potential harm. This work explores the risks associated with deploying LLMs and evaluates current approaches to implementing guardrails and model alignment techniques. We examine intrinsic and extrinsic bias evaluation methods and discuss the importance of fairness metrics for responsible AI development. The safety and reliability of agentic LLMs (those capable of real-world actions) are explored, emphasizing the need for testability, fail-safes, and situational awareness. Technical strategies for securing LLMs are presented, including a layered protection model operating at external, secondary, and internal levels. System prompts, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, and techniques to minimize bias and protect privacy are highlighted. Effective guardrail design requires a deep understanding of the LLM's intended use case, relevant regulations, and ethical considerations. Striking a balance between competing requirements, such as accuracy and privacy, remains an ongoing challenge. This work underscores the importance of continuous research and development to ensure the safe and responsible use of LLMs in real-world applications.

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/.

Safety limitations in service robotics across various industries have raised significant concerns about the need for robust mechanisms ensuring that robots adhere to safe practices, thereby preventing actions that might harm humans or cause property damage. Despite advances, including the integration of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with Large Language Models (LLMs), challenges in ensuring consistent safety in autonomous robot actions persist. In this paper, we propose a novel integration of Large Language Models with Embodied Robotic Control Prompts (ERCPs) and Embodied Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) to enhance the safety framework for service robots. ERCPs are designed as predefined instructions that ensure LLMs generate safe and precise responses. These responses are subsequently validated by EKGs, which provide a comprehensive knowledge base ensuring that the actions of the robot are continuously aligned with safety protocols, thereby promoting safer operational practices in varied contexts. Our experimental setup involved diverse real-world tasks, where robots equipped with our framework demonstrated significantly higher compliance with safety standards compared to traditional methods. This integration fosters secure human-robot interactions and positions our methodology at the forefront of AI-driven safety innovations in service robotics.

With the rapid popularity of large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, a growing amount of attention is paid to their safety concerns. These models may generate insulting and discriminatory content, reflect incorrect social values, and may be used for malicious purposes such as fraud and dissemination of misleading information. Evaluating and enhancing their safety is particularly essential for the wide application of large language models (LLMs). To further promote the safe deployment of LLMs, we develop a Chinese LLM safety assessment benchmark. Our benchmark explores the comprehensive safety performance of LLMs from two perspectives: 8 kinds of typical safety scenarios and 6 types of more challenging instruction attacks. Our benchmark is based on a straightforward process in which it provides the test prompts and evaluates the safety of the generated responses from the evaluated model. In evaluation, we utilize the LLM's strong evaluation ability and develop it as a safety evaluator by prompting. On top of this benchmark, we conduct safety assessments and analyze 15 LLMs including the OpenAI GPT series and other well-known Chinese LLMs, where we observe some interesting findings. For example, we find that instruction attacks are more likely to expose safety issues of all LLMs. Moreover, to promote the development and deployment of safe, responsible, and ethical AI, we publicly release SafetyPrompts including 100k augmented prompts and responses by LLMs.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled impressive generalization across diverse video understanding tasks under zero-shot settings. However, their capabilities in high-stakes industrial domains-where recognizing both routine operations and safety-critical anomalies is essential-remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce iSafetyBench, a new video-language benchmark specifically designed to evaluate model performance in industrial environments across both normal and hazardous scenarios. iSafetyBench comprises 1,100 video clips sourced from real-world industrial settings, annotated with open-vocabulary, multi-label action tags spanning 98 routine and 67 hazardous action categories. Each clip is paired with multiple-choice questions for both single-label and multi-label evaluation, enabling fine-grained assessment of VLMs in both standard and safety-critical contexts. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art video-language models under zero-shot conditions. Despite their strong performance on existing video benchmarks, these models struggle with iSafetyBench-particularly in recognizing hazardous activities and in multi-label scenarios. Our results reveal significant performance gaps, underscoring the need for more robust, safety-aware multimodal models for industrial applications. iSafetyBench provides a first-of-its-kind testbed to drive progress in this direction. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/raiyaan-abdullah/iSafety-Bench.

Detecting the anomalies of web applications, important infrastructures for running modern companies and governments, is crucial for providing reliable web services. Many modern web applications operate on web APIs (e.g., RESTful, SOAP, and WebSockets), their exposure invites intended attacks or unintended illegal visits, causing abnormal system behaviors. However, such anomalies can share very similar logs with normal logs, missing crucial information (which could be in database) for log discrimination. Further, log instances can be also noisy, which can further mislead the state-of-the-art log learning solutions to learn spurious correlation, resulting superficial models and rules for anomaly detection. In this work, we propose MINES which infers explainable API invariants for anomaly detection from the schema level instead of detailed raw log instances, which can (1) significantly discriminate noise in logs to identify precise normalities and (2) detect abnormal behaviors beyond the instrumented logs. Technically, MINES (1) converts API signatures into table schema to enhance the original database shema; and (2) infers the potential database constraints on the enhanced database schema to capture the potential relationships between APIs and database tables. MINES uses LLM for extracting potential relationship based on two given table structures; and use normal log instances to reject and accept LLM-generated invariants. Finally, MINES translates the inferred constraints into invariants to generate Python code for verifying the runtime logs. We extensively evaluate MINES on web-tamper attacks on the benchmarks of TrainTicket, NiceFish, Gitea, Mastodon, and NextCloud against baselines such as LogRobust, LogFormer, and WebNorm. The results show that MINES achieves high recall for the anomalies while introducing almost zero false positives, indicating a new state-of-the-art.

This paper addresses the critical challenge of deriving interpretable confidence scores from generative language models (LLMs) when applied to multi-label content safety classification. While models like LLaMA Guard are effective for identifying unsafe content and its categories, their generative architecture inherently lacks direct class-level probabilities, which hinders model confidence assessment and performance interpretation. This limitation complicates the setting of dynamic thresholds for content moderation and impedes fine-grained error analysis. This research proposes and evaluates three novel token-level probability estimation approaches to bridge this gap. The aim is to enhance model interpretability and accuracy, and evaluate the generalizability of this framework across different instruction-tuned models. Through extensive experimentation on a synthetically generated, rigorously annotated dataset, it is demonstrated that leveraging token logits significantly improves the interpretability and reliability of generative classifiers, enabling more nuanced content safety moderation.

Construction safety inspections typically involve a human inspector identifying safety concerns on-site. With the rise of powerful Vision Language Models (VLMs), researchers are exploring their use for tasks such as detecting safety rule violations from on-site images. However, there is a lack of open datasets to comprehensively evaluate and further fine-tune VLMs in construction safety inspection. Current applications of VLMs use small, supervised datasets, limiting their applicability in tasks they are not directly trained for. In this paper, we propose the ConstructionSite 10k, featuring 10,000 construction site images with annotations for three inter-connected tasks, including image captioning, safety rule violation visual question answering (VQA), and construction element visual grounding. Our subsequent evaluation of current state-of-the-art large pre-trained VLMs shows notable generalization abilities in zero-shot and few-shot settings, while additional training is needed to make them applicable to actual construction sites. This dataset allows researchers to train and evaluate their own VLMs with new architectures and techniques, providing a valuable benchmark for construction safety inspection.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated progress toward artificial general intelligence, yet their potential to generate harmful content poses critical safety challenges. Existing alignment methods often struggle to cover diverse safety scenarios and remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose Ex-Ante Reasoning Preference Optimization (ERPO), a novel safety alignment framework that equips LLMs with explicit preemptive reasoning through Chain-of-Thought and provides clear evidence for safety judgments by embedding predefined safety rules. Specifically, our approach consists of three stages: first, equipping the model with Ex-Ante reasoning through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using a constructed reasoning module; second, enhancing safety, usefulness, and efficiency via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO); and third, mitigating inference latency with a length-controlled iterative preference optimization strategy. Experiments on multiple open-source LLMs demonstrate that ERPO significantly enhances safety performance while maintaining response efficiency.

Although large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities on complex tasks, recent studies reveal that these models frequently fulfill harmful user instructions, raising significant safety concerns. In this paper, we investigate the underlying cause of LRM safety risks and find that models already possess sufficient safety knowledge but fail to activate it during reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose R1-Act, a simple and efficient post-training method that explicitly triggers safety knowledge through a structured reasoning process. R1-Act achieves strong safety improvements while preserving reasoning performance, outperforming prior alignment methods. Notably, it requires only 1,000 training examples and 90 minutes of training on a single RTX A6000 GPU. Extensive experiments across multiple LRM backbones and sizes demonstrate the robustness, scalability, and practical efficiency of our approach.

As machine learning systems become ubiquitous, there has been a surge of interest in interpretable machine learning: systems that provide explanation for their outputs. These explanations are often used to qualitatively assess other criteria such as safety or non-discrimination. However, despite the interest in interpretability, there is very little consensus on what interpretable machine learning is and how it should be measured. In this position paper, we first define interpretability and describe when interpretability is needed (and when it is not). Next, we suggest a taxonomy for rigorous evaluation and expose open questions towards a more rigorous science of interpretable machine learning.

Automated incident management plays a pivotal role in large-scale microservice systems. However, many existing methods rely solely on single-modal data (e.g., metrics, logs, and traces) and struggle to simultaneously address multiple downstream tasks, including anomaly detection (AD), failure triage (FT), and root cause localization (RCL). Moreover, the lack of clear reasoning evidence in current techniques often leads to insufficient interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose TrioXpert, an end-to-end incident management framework capable of fully leveraging multimodal data. TrioXpert designs three independent data processing pipelines based on the inherent characteristics of different modalities, comprehensively characterizing the operational status of microservice systems from both numerical and textual dimensions. It employs a collaborative reasoning mechanism using large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously handle multiple tasks while providing clear reasoning evidence to ensure strong interpretability. We conducted extensive evaluations on two microservice system datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that TrioXpert achieves outstanding performance in AD (improving by 4.7% to 57.7%), FT (improving by 2.1% to 40.6%), and RCL (improving by 1.6% to 163.1%) tasks. TrioXpert has also been deployed in Lenovo's production environment, demonstrating substantial gains in diagnostic efficiency and accuracy.

Reasoning methods that adaptively allocate test-time compute have advanced LLM performance on easy to verify domains such as math and code. In this work, we study how to utilize this approach to train models that exhibit a degree of robustness to safety vulnerabilities, and show that doing so can provide benefits. We build a recipe called TARS (Training Adaptive Reasoners for Safety), a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that trains models to reason about safety using chain-of-thought traces and a reward signal that balances safety with task completion. To build TARS, we identify three critical design choices: (1) a "lightweight" warmstart SFT stage, (2) a mix of harmful, harmless, and ambiguous prompts to prevent shortcut behaviors such as too many refusals, and (3) a reward function to prevent degeneration of reasoning capabilities during training. Models trained with TARS exhibit adaptive behaviors by spending more compute on ambiguous queries, leading to better safety-refusal trade-offs. They also internally learn to better distinguish between safe and unsafe prompts and attain greater robustness to both white-box (e.g., GCG) and black-box attacks (e.g., PAIR). Overall, our work provides an effective, open recipe for training LLMs against jailbreaks and harmful requests by reasoning per prompt.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in critical domains like healthcare, justice, and social services has sparked numerous regulatory initiatives aimed at ensuring their safe deployment. Current regulatory frameworks, exemplified by recent US and EU efforts, primarily focus on procedural guidelines while presuming that scientific benchmarking can effectively validate AI safety, similar to how crash tests verify vehicle safety or clinical trials validate drug efficacy. However, this approach fundamentally misunderstands the unique technical challenges posed by modern AI systems. Through systematic analysis of successful technology regulation case studies, we demonstrate that effective scientific regulation requires a causal theory linking observable test outcomes to future performance - for instance, how a vehicle's crash resistance at one speed predicts its safety at lower speeds. We show that deep learning models, which learn complex statistical patterns from training data without explicit causal mechanisms, preclude such guarantees. This limitation renders traditional regulatory approaches inadequate for ensuring AI safety. Moving forward, we call for regulators to reckon with this limitation, and propose a preliminary two-tiered regulatory framework that acknowledges these constraints: mandating human oversight for high-risk applications while developing appropriate risk communication strategies for lower-risk uses. Our findings highlight the urgent need to reconsider fundamental assumptions in AI regulation and suggest a concrete path forward for policymakers and researchers.

As Video Large Multimodal Models (VLMMs) rapidly advance, their inherent complexity introduces significant safety challenges, particularly the issue of mismatched generalization where static safety alignments fail to transfer to dynamic video contexts. We introduce SafeVid, a framework designed to instill video-specific safety principles in VLMMs. SafeVid uniquely transfers robust textual safety alignment capabilities to the video domain by employing detailed textual video descriptions as an interpretive bridge, facilitating LLM-based rule-driven safety reasoning. This is achieved through a closed-loop system comprising: 1) generation of SafeVid-350K, a novel 350,000-pair video-specific safety preference dataset; 2) targeted alignment of VLMMs using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO); and 3) comprehensive evaluation via our new SafeVidBench benchmark. Alignment with SafeVid-350K significantly enhances VLMM safety, with models like LLaVA-NeXT-Video demonstrating substantial improvements (e.g., up to 42.39%) on SafeVidBench. SafeVid provides critical resources and a structured approach, demonstrating that leveraging textual descriptions as a conduit for safety reasoning markedly improves the safety alignment of VLMMs. We have made SafeVid-350K dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/yxwang/SafeVid-350K) publicly available.

Evaluating explanations of image classifiers regarding ground truth, e.g. segmentation masks defined by human perception, primarily evaluates the quality of the models under consideration rather than the explanation methods themselves. Driven by this observation, we propose a framework for jointly evaluating the robustness of safety-critical systems that combine a deep neural network with an explanation method. These are increasingly used in real-world applications like medical image analysis or robotics. We introduce a fine-tuning procedure to (mis)align modelx2013explanation pipelines with ground truth and use it to quantify the potential discrepancy between worst and best-case scenarios of human alignment. Experiments across various model architectures and post-hoc local interpretation methods provide insights into the robustness of vision transformers and the overall vulnerability of such AI systems to potential adversarial attacks.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their deployment in safety-critical domains poses significant challenges. Existing safety fine-tuning methods, which focus on textual or multimodal content, fall short in addressing challenging cases or disrupt the balance between helpfulness and harmlessness. Our evaluation highlights a safety reasoning gap: these methods lack safety visual reasoning ability, leading to such bottlenecks. To address this limitation and enhance both visual perception and reasoning in safety-critical contexts, we propose a novel dataset that integrates multi-image inputs with safety Chain-of-Thought (CoT) labels as fine-grained reasoning logic to improve model performance. Specifically, we introduce the Multi-Image Safety (MIS) dataset, an instruction-following dataset tailored for multi-image safety scenarios, consisting of training and test splits. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning InternVL2.5-8B with MIS significantly outperforms both powerful open-source models and API-based models in challenging multi-image tasks requiring safety-related visual reasoning. This approach not only delivers exceptional safety performance but also preserves general capabilities without any trade-offs. Specifically, fine-tuning with MIS increases average accuracy by 0.83% across five general benchmarks and reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) on multiple safety benchmarks by a large margin. Data and Models are released under: https://dripnowhy.github.io/MIS/{https://dripnowhy.github.io/MIS/}

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) become an indispensable assistant in human life, the unsafe content generated by MLLMs poses a danger to human behavior, perpetually overhanging human society like a sword of Damocles. To investigate and evaluate the safety impact of MLLMs responses on human behavior in daily life, we introduce SaLAD, a multimodal safety benchmark which contains 2,013 real-world image-text samples across 10 common categories, with a balanced design covering both unsafe scenarios and cases of oversensitivity. It emphasizes realistic risk exposure, authentic visual inputs, and fine-grained cross-modal reasoning, ensuring that safety risks cannot be inferred from text alone. We further propose a safety-warning-based evaluation framework that encourages models to provide clear and informative safety warnings, rather than generic refusals. Results on 18 MLLMs demonstrate that the top-performing models achieve a safe response rate of only 57.2% on unsafe queries. Moreover, even popular safety alignment methods limit effectiveness of the models in our scenario, revealing the vulnerabilities of current MLLMs in identifying dangerous behaviors in daily life. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/xinyuelou/SaLAD.

We introduce Llama Guard, an LLM-based input-output safeguard model geared towards Human-AI conversation use cases. Our model incorporates a safety risk taxonomy, a valuable tool for categorizing a specific set of safety risks found in LLM prompts (i.e., prompt classification). This taxonomy is also instrumental in classifying the responses generated by LLMs to these prompts, a process we refer to as response classification. For the purpose of both prompt and response classification, we have meticulously gathered a dataset of high quality. Llama Guard, a Llama2-7b model that is instruction-tuned on our collected dataset, albeit low in volume, demonstrates strong performance on existing benchmarks such as the OpenAI Moderation Evaluation dataset and ToxicChat, where its performance matches or exceeds that of currently available content moderation tools. Llama Guard functions as a language model, carrying out multi-class classification and generating binary decision scores. Furthermore, the instruction fine-tuning of Llama Guard allows for the customization of tasks and the adaptation of output formats. This feature enhances the model's capabilities, such as enabling the adjustment of taxonomy categories to align with specific use cases, and facilitating zero-shot or few-shot prompting with diverse taxonomies at the input. We are making Llama Guard model weights available and we encourage researchers to further develop and adapt them to meet the evolving needs of the community for AI safety.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have exhibited extraordinary prowess in tasks like mathematics and coding, leveraging their advanced reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, as these capabilities progress, significant concerns regarding their vulnerabilities and safety have arisen, which can pose challenges to their deployment and application in real-world settings. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of LRMs, meticulously exploring and summarizing the newly emerged safety risks, attacks, and defense strategies. By organizing these elements into a detailed taxonomy, this work aims to offer a clear and structured understanding of the current safety landscape of LRMs, facilitating future research and development to enhance the security and reliability of these powerful models.

LLM-based agents are deployed in safety-critical applications, yet current guardrail systems fail to prevent violations of temporal safety policies, requirements that govern the ordering and sequencing of agent actions. For instance, agents may access sensitive data before authenticating users or process refunds to unauthorized payment methods, violations that require reasoning about sequences of action rather than an individual action. Existing guardrails rely on imprecise natural language instructions or post-hoc monitoring, and provide no formal guarantees that agents will satisfy temporal constraints. We present Agent-C, a novel framework that provides run-time guarantees ensuring LLM agents adhere to formal temporal safety properties. Agent-C introduces a domain-specific language for expressing temporal properties (e.g., authenticate before accessing data), translates specifications to first-order logic, and uses SMT solving to detect non-compliant agent actions during token generation. When the LLM attempts to generate a non-compliant tool call, Agent-C leverages constrained generation techniques to ensure that every action generated by the LLM complies with the specification, and to generate a compliant alternative to a non-compliant agent action. We evaluate Agent-C across two real-world applications: retail customer service and airline ticket reservation system, and multiple language models (open and closed-source). Our results demonstrate that Agent-C achieves perfect safety (100% conformance, 0% harm), while improving task utility compared to state-of-the-art guardrails and unrestricted agents. On SoTA closed-source models, Agent-C improves conformance (77.4% to 100% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 83.7% to 100% for GPT-5), while simultaneously increasing utility (71.8% to 75.2% and 66.1% to 70.6%, respectively), representing a new SoTA frontier for reliable agentic reasoning.

With the profound development of large language models(LLMs), their safety concerns have garnered increasing attention. However, there is a scarcity of Chinese safety benchmarks for LLMs, and the existing safety taxonomies are inadequate, lacking comprehensive safety detection capabilities in authentic Chinese scenarios. In this work, we introduce CHiSafetyBench, a dedicated safety benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in identifying risky content and refusing answering risky questions in Chinese contexts. CHiSafetyBench incorporates a dataset that covers a hierarchical Chinese safety taxonomy consisting of 5 risk areas and 31 categories. This dataset comprises two types of tasks: multiple-choice questions and question-answering, evaluating LLMs from the perspectives of risk content identification and the ability to refuse answering risky questions respectively. Utilizing this benchmark, we validate the feasibility of automatic evaluation as a substitute for human evaluation and conduct comprehensive automatic safety assessments on mainstream Chinese LLMs. Our experiments reveal the varying performance of different models across various safety domains, indicating that all models possess considerable potential for improvement in Chinese safety capabilities. Our dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/UnicomAI/UnicomBenchmark/tree/main/CHiSafetyBench.

Most safety testing efforts for large language models (LLMs) today focus on evaluating foundation models. However, there is a growing need to evaluate safety at the application level, as components such as system prompts, retrieval pipelines, and guardrails introduce additional factors that significantly influence the overall safety of LLM applications. In this paper, we introduce a practical framework for evaluating application-level safety in LLM systems, validated through real-world deployment across multiple use cases within our organization. The framework consists of two parts: (1) principles for developing customized safety risk taxonomies, and (2) practices for evaluating safety risks in LLM applications. We illustrate how the proposed framework was applied in our internal pilot, providing a reference point for organizations seeking to scale their safety testing efforts. This work aims to bridge the gap between theoretical concepts in AI safety and the operational realities of safeguarding LLM applications in practice, offering actionable guidance for safe and scalable deployment.

Large Language Models used in ChatGPT have traditionally been trained to learn a refusal boundary: depending on the user's intent, the model is taught to either fully comply or outright refuse. While this is a strong mitigation for explicitly malicious prompts, focusing safety training on refusals can lead to brittleness for prompts with obscured user intent. Binary refusal boundaries are especially ill-suited for dual-use cases (such as biology or cybersecurity), where a user request can be answered safely at a high level, but in some cases can lead to malicious uplift if sufficiently detailed or actionable. As an alternative, we propose safe-completions: a safety-training approach that centers on the safety of the assistant's output, rather than a binary classification of the user's intent. Safe-completions seek to maximize helpfulness within the safety policy's constraints. We incorporated this approach into GPT-5 and find that across both production comparisons and internally controlled experiments, safe-completion training improves safety (especially on dual-use prompts), reduces the severity of residual safety failures, and substantially increases model helpfulness.

Most prior safety research of large language models (LLMs) has focused on enhancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit the safety requirements of humans. However, internalizing such safeguard features into larger models brought challenges of higher training cost and unintended degradation of helpfulness. To overcome such challenges, a modular approach employing a smaller LLM to detect harmful user queries is regarded as a convenient solution in designing LLM-based system with safety requirements. In this paper, we leverage a smaller LLM for both harmful query detection and safeguard response generation. We introduce our safety requirements and the taxonomy of harmfulness categories, and then propose a multi-task learning mechanism fusing the two tasks into a single model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, providing on par or surpassing harmful query detection and safeguard response performance compared to the publicly available LLMs.

When building Large Language Models (LLMs), it is paramount to bear safety in mind and protect them with guardrails. Indeed, LLMs should never generate content promoting or normalizing harmful, illegal, or unethical behavior that may contribute to harm to individuals or society. This principle applies to both normal and adversarial use. In response, we introduce ALERT, a large-scale benchmark to assess safety based on a novel fine-grained risk taxonomy. It is designed to evaluate the safety of LLMs through red teaming methodologies and consists of more than 45k instructions categorized using our novel taxonomy. By subjecting LLMs to adversarial testing scenarios, ALERT aims to identify vulnerabilities, inform improvements, and enhance the overall safety of the language models. Furthermore, the fine-grained taxonomy enables researchers to perform an in-depth evaluation that also helps one to assess the alignment with various policies. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate 10 popular open- and closed-source LLMs and demonstrate that many of them still struggle to attain reasonable levels of safety.

Flawed planning from VLM-driven embodied agents poses significant safety hazards, hindering their deployment in real-world household tasks. However, existing static, non-interactive evaluation paradigms fail to adequately assess risks within these interactive environments, since they cannot simulate dynamic risks that emerge from an agent's actions and rely on unreliable post-hoc evaluations that ignore unsafe intermediate steps. To bridge this critical gap, we propose evaluating an agent's interactive safety: its ability to perceive emergent risks and execute mitigation steps in the correct procedural order. We thus present IS-Bench, the first multi-modal benchmark designed for interactive safety, featuring 161 challenging scenarios with 388 unique safety risks instantiated in a high-fidelity simulator. Crucially, it facilitates a novel process-oriented evaluation that verifies whether risk mitigation actions are performed before/after specific risk-prone steps. Extensive experiments on leading VLMs, including the GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5 series, reveal that current agents lack interactive safety awareness, and that while safety-aware Chain-of-Thought can improve performance, it often compromises task completion. By highlighting these critical limitations, IS-Bench provides a foundation for developing safer and more reliable embodied AI systems.

Reducing traffic accidents is an important public safety challenge, therefore, accident analysis and prediction has been a topic of much research over the past few decades. Using small-scale datasets with limited coverage, being dependent on extensive set of data, and being not applicable for real-time purposes are the important shortcomings of the existing studies. To address these challenges, we propose a new solution for real-time traffic accident prediction using easy-to-obtain, but sparse data. Our solution relies on a deep-neural-network model (which we have named DAP, for Deep Accident Prediction); which utilizes a variety of data attributes such as traffic events, weather data, points-of-interest, and time. DAP incorporates multiple components including a recurrent (for time-sensitive data), a fully connected (for time-insensitive data), and a trainable embedding component (to capture spatial heterogeneity). To fill the data gap, we have - through a comprehensive process of data collection, integration, and augmentation - created a large-scale publicly available database of accident information named US-Accidents. By employing the US-Accidents dataset and through an extensive set of experiments across several large cities, we have evaluated our proposal against several baselines. Our analysis and results show significant improvements to predict rare accident events. Further, we have shown the impact of traffic information, time, and points-of-interest data for real-time accident prediction.

The availability of representative datasets is an essential prerequisite for many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, in real life applications these models often encounter scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. There are various reasons for the absence of sufficient data, ranging from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable usage of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is still a tremendous challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches. Knowledge augmented machine learning approaches offer the possibility of compensating for deficiencies, errors, or ambiguities in the data, thus increasing the generalization capability of the applied models. Even more, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-driven models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories knowledge integration, extraction and conformity. In particular, we address the application of the presented methods in the field of autonomous driving.

Current approaches to LLM safety fundamentally rely on a brittle cat-and-mouse game of identifying and blocking known threats via guardrails. We argue for a fresh approach: robust safety comes not from enumerating what is harmful, but from deeply understanding what is safe. We introduce Trust The Typical (T3), a framework that operationalizes this principle by treating safety as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem. T3 learns the distribution of acceptable prompts in a semantic space and flags any significant deviation as a potential threat. Unlike prior methods, it requires no training on harmful examples, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance across 18 benchmarks spanning toxicity, hate speech, jailbreaking, multilingual harms, and over-refusal, reducing false positive rates by up to 40x relative to specialized safety models. A single model trained only on safe English text transfers effectively to diverse domains and over 14 languages without retraining. Finally, we demonstrate production readiness by integrating a GPU-optimized version into vLLM, enabling continuous guardrailing during token generation with less than 6% overhead even under dense evaluation intervals on large-scale workloads.

Robots must operate safely when deployed in novel and human-centered environments, like homes. Current safe control approaches typically assume that the safety constraints are known a priori, and thus, the robot can pre-compute a corresponding safety controller. While this may make sense for some safety constraints (e.g., avoiding collision with walls by analyzing a floor plan), other constraints are more complex (e.g., spills), inherently personal, context-dependent, and can only be identified at deployment time when the robot is interacting in a specific environment and with a specific person (e.g., fragile objects, expensive rugs). Here, language provides a flexible mechanism to communicate these evolving safety constraints to the robot. In this work, we use vision language models (VLMs) to interpret language feedback and the robot's image observations to continuously update the robot's representation of safety constraints. With these inferred constraints, we update a Hamilton-Jacobi reachability safety controller online via efficient warm-starting techniques. Through simulation and hardware experiments, we demonstrate the robot's ability to infer and respect language-based safety constraints with the proposed approach.

Chai empowers users to create and interact with customized chatbots, offering unique and engaging experiences. Despite the exciting prospects, the work recognizes the inherent challenges of a commitment to modern safety standards. Therefore, this paper presents the integrated AI safety principles into Chai to prioritize user safety, data protection, and ethical technology use. The paper specifically explores the multidimensional domain of AI safety research, demonstrating its application in Chai's conversational chatbot platform. It presents Chai's AI safety principles, informed by well-established AI research centres and adapted for chat AI. This work proposes the following safety framework: Content Safeguarding; Stability and Robustness; and Operational Transparency and Traceability. The subsequent implementation of these principles is outlined, followed by an experimental analysis of Chai's AI safety framework's real-world impact. We emphasise the significance of conscientious application of AI safety principles and robust safety measures. The successful implementation of the safe AI framework in Chai indicates the practicality of mitigating potential risks for responsible and ethical use of AI technologies. The ultimate vision is a transformative AI tool fostering progress and innovation while prioritizing user safety and ethical standards.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are rapidly evolving, demonstrating impressive capabilities as multimodal assistants that interact with both humans and their environments. However, this increased sophistication introduces significant safety concerns. In this paper, we present the first evaluation and analysis of a novel safety challenge termed Multimodal Situational Safety, which explores how safety considerations vary based on the specific situation in which the user or agent is engaged. We argue that for an MLLM to respond safely, whether through language or action, it often needs to assess the safety implications of a language query within its corresponding visual context. To evaluate this capability, we develop the Multimodal Situational Safety benchmark (MSSBench) to assess the situational safety performance of current MLLMs. The dataset comprises 1,820 language query-image pairs, half of which the image context is safe, and the other half is unsafe. We also develop an evaluation framework that analyzes key safety aspects, including explicit safety reasoning, visual understanding, and, crucially, situational safety reasoning. Our findings reveal that current MLLMs struggle with this nuanced safety problem in the instruction-following setting and struggle to tackle these situational safety challenges all at once, highlighting a key area for future research. Furthermore, we develop multi-agent pipelines to coordinately solve safety challenges, which shows consistent improvement in safety over the original MLLM response. Code and data: mssbench.github.io.

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.

The rapid evolution of generative models has led to a continuous emergence of multimodal safety risks, exposing the limitations of existing defense methods. To address these challenges, we propose ProGuard, a vision-language proactive guard that identifies and describes out-of-distribution (OOD) safety risks without the need for model adjustments required by traditional reactive approaches. We first construct a modality-balanced dataset of 87K samples, each annotated with both binary safety labels and risk categories under a hierarchical multimodal safety taxonomy, effectively mitigating modality bias and ensuring consistent moderation across text, image, and text-image inputs. Based on this dataset, we train our vision-language base model purely through reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve efficient and concise reasoning. To approximate proactive safety scenarios in a controlled setting, we further introduce an OOD safety category inference task and augment the RL objective with a synonym-bank-based similarity reward that encourages the model to generate concise descriptions for unseen unsafe categories. Experimental results show that ProGuard achieves performance comparable to closed-source large models on binary safety classification, substantially outperforms existing open-source guard models on unsafe content categorization. Most notably, ProGuard delivers a strong proactive moderation ability, improving OOD risk detection by 52.6% and OOD risk description by 64.8%.

Ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as they become integral to applications like translation and question answering. Current alignment methods struggle with dynamic user intentions and complex objectives, making models vulnerable to generating harmful content. We propose Safety Arithmetic, a training-free framework enhancing LLM safety across different scenarios: Base models, Supervised fine-tuned models (SFT), and Edited models. Safety Arithmetic involves Harm Direction Removal to avoid harmful content and Safety Alignment to promote safe responses. Additionally, we present NoIntentEdit, a dataset highlighting edit instances that could compromise model safety if used unintentionally. Our experiments show that Safety Arithmetic significantly improves safety measures, reduces over-safety, and maintains model utility, outperforming existing methods in ensuring safe content generation.

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.

Rapid advances in multimodal models demand benchmarks that rigorously evaluate understanding and reasoning in safety-critical, dynamic real-world settings. We present AccidentBench, a large-scale benchmark that combines vehicle accident scenarios with Beyond domains, safety-critical settings in air and water that emphasize spatial and temporal reasoning (e.g., navigation, orientation, multi-vehicle motion). The benchmark contains approximately 2000 videos and over 19000 human-annotated question--answer pairs spanning multiple video lengths (short/medium/long) and difficulty levels (easy/medium/hard). Tasks systematically probe core capabilities: temporal, spatial, and intent understanding and reasoning. By unifying accident-centric traffic scenes with broader safety-critical scenarios in air and water, AccidentBench offers a comprehensive, physically grounded testbed for evaluating models under real-world variability. Evaluations of state-of-the-art models (e.g., Gemini-2.5 Pro and GPT-5) show that even the strongest models achieve only about 18% accuracy on the hardest tasks and longest videos, revealing substantial gaps in real-world temporal, spatial, and intent reasoning. AccidentBench is designed to expose these critical gaps and drive the development of multimodal models that are safer, more robust, and better aligned with real-world safety-critical challenges. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/AccidentBench

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.

While it is still unclear if agents with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could ever be built, we can already use mathematical models to investigate potential safety systems for these agents. We present an AGI safety layer that creates a special dedicated input terminal to support the iterative improvement of an AGI agent's utility function. The humans who switched on the agent can use this terminal to close any loopholes that are discovered in the utility function's encoding of agent goals and constraints, to direct the agent towards new goals, or to force the agent to switch itself off. An AGI agent may develop the emergent incentive to manipulate the above utility function improvement process, for example by deceiving, restraining, or even attacking the humans involved. The safety layer will partially, and sometimes fully, suppress this dangerous incentive. The first part of this paper generalizes earlier work on AGI emergency stop buttons. We aim to make the mathematical methods used to construct the layer more accessible, by applying them to an MDP model. We discuss two provable properties of the safety layer, and show ongoing work in mapping it to a Causal Influence Diagram (CID). In the second part, we develop full mathematical proofs, and show that the safety layer creates a type of bureaucratic blindness. We then present the design of a learning agent, a design that wraps the safety layer around either a known machine learning system, or a potential future AGI-level learning system. The resulting agent will satisfy the provable safety properties from the moment it is first switched on. Finally, we show how this agent can be mapped from its model to a real-life implementation. We review the methodological issues involved in this step, and discuss how these are typically resolved.

Industrial processes must be robust and adaptable, as environments and tasks are often unpredictable, while operational errors remain costly and difficult to detect. AI-based control systems offer a path forward, yet typically depend on supervised learning with extensive labelled datasets, which limits their ability to generalize across variable and data-scarce industrial settings. Foundation models could enable broader reasoning and knowledge integration, but rarely deliver the quantitative precision demanded by engineering applications. Here, we introduceControl and Interpretation of Production via Hybrid Expertise and Reasoning (CIPHER): a vision-language-action (VLA) model framework aiming to replicate human-like reasoning for industrial control, instantiated in a commercial-grade 3D printer. It integrates a process expert, a regression model enabling quantitative characterization of system states required for engineering tasks. CIPHER also incorporates retrieval-augmented generation to access external expert knowledge and support physics-informed, chain-of-thought reasoning. This hybrid architecture exhibits strong generalization to out-of-distribution tasks. It interprets visual or textual inputs from process monitoring, explains its decisions, and autonomously generates precise machine instructions, without requiring explicit annotations. CIPHER thus lays the foundations for autonomous systems that act with precision, reason with context, and communicate decisions transparently, supporting safe and trusted deployment in industrial settings.

Safety lies at the core of developing and deploying large language models (LLMs). However, previous safety benchmarks only concern the safety in one language, e.g. the majority language in the pretraining data such as English. In this work, we build the first multilingual safety benchmark for LLMs, XSafety, in response to the global deployment of LLMs in practice. XSafety covers 14 kinds of commonly used safety issues across 10 languages that span several language families. We utilize XSafety to empirically study the multilingual safety for 4 widely-used LLMs, including both close-API and open-source models. Experimental results show that all LLMs produce significantly more unsafe responses for non-English queries than English ones, indicating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-English languages. In addition, we propose several simple and effective prompting methods to improve the multilingual safety of ChatGPT by evoking safety knowledge and improving cross-lingual generalization of safety alignment. Our prompting method can significantly reduce the ratio of unsafe responses from 19.1% to 9.7% for non-English queries. We release our data at https://github.com/Jarviswang94/Multilingual_safety_benchmark.

Training large language models to follow instructions makes them perform better on a wide range of tasks, generally becoming more helpful. However, a perfectly helpful model will follow even the most malicious instructions and readily generate harmful content. In this paper, we raise concerns over the safety of models that only emphasize helpfulness, not safety, in their instruction-tuning. We show that several popular instruction-tuned models are highly unsafe. Moreover, we show that adding just 3% safety examples (a few hundred demonstrations) in the training set when fine-tuning a model like LLaMA can substantially improve their safety. Our safety-tuning does not make models significantly less capable or helpful as measured by standard benchmarks. However, we do find a behavior of exaggerated safety, where too much safety-tuning makes models refuse to respond to reasonable prompts that superficially resemble unsafe ones. Our study sheds light on trade-offs in training LLMs to follow instructions and exhibit safe behavior.

We present SGuard-v1, a lightweight safety guardrail for Large Language Models (LLMs), which comprises two specialized models to detect harmful content and screen adversarial prompts in human-AI conversational settings. The first component, ContentFilter, is trained to identify safety risks in LLM prompts and responses in accordance with the MLCommons hazard taxonomy, a comprehensive framework for trust and safety assessment of AI. The second component, JailbreakFilter, is trained with a carefully designed curriculum over integrated datasets and findings from prior work on adversarial prompting, covering 60 major attack types while mitigating false-unsafe classification. SGuard-v1 is built on the 2B-parameter Granite-3.3-2B-Instruct model that supports 12 languages. We curate approximately 1.4 million training instances from both collected and synthesized data and perform instruction tuning on the base model, distributing the curated data across the two component according to their designated functions. Through extensive evaluation on public and proprietary safety benchmarks, SGuard-v1 achieves state-of-the-art safety performance while remaining lightweight, thereby reducing deployment overhead. SGuard-v1 also improves interpretability for downstream use by providing multi-class safety predictions and their binary confidence scores. We release the SGuard-v1 under the Apache-2.0 License to enable further research and practical deployment in AI safety.

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.