Daily Papers

Hospitals struggle to predict critical outcomes. Traditional early warning systems, like NEWS and MEWS, rely on static variables and fixed thresholds, limiting their adaptability, accuracy, and personalization. We previously developed the Enhanced Transformer for Health Outcome Simulation (ETHOS), an AI model that tokenizes patient health timelines (PHTs) from EHRs and uses transformer-based architectures to predict future PHTs. ETHOS is a versatile framework for developing a wide range of applications. In this work, we develop the Adaptive Risk Estimation System (ARES) that leverages ETHOS to compute dynamic, personalized risk probabilities for clinician-defined critical events. ARES also features a personalized explainability module that highlights key clinical factors influencing risk estimates. We evaluated ARES using the MIMIC-IV v2.2 dataset together with its Emergency Department (ED) extension and benchmarked performance against both classical early warning systems and contemporary machine learning models. The entire dataset was tokenized resulting in 285,622 PHTs, comprising over 360 million tokens. ETHOS outperformed benchmark models in predicting hospital admissions, ICU admissions, and prolonged stays, achieving superior AUC scores. Its risk estimates were robust across demographic subgroups, with calibration curves confirming model reliability. The explainability module provided valuable insights into patient-specific risk factors. ARES, powered by ETHOS, advances predictive healthcare AI by delivering dynamic, real-time, personalized risk estimation with patient-specific explainability. Although our results are promising, the clinical impact remains uncertain. Demonstrating ARES's true utility in real-world settings will be the focus of our future work. We release the source code to facilitate future research.

Autonomous language-model agents increasingly rely on installable skills and tools to complete user tasks. Static skill auditing can expose capability surface before deployment, but it cannot determine whether a particular invocation is unsafe under the current user request and runtime context. We therefore study skill invocation auditing as a continuous-risk estimation problem: given a user request, candidate skill, and runtime context, predict a score that supports ranking and triage before a hard intervention is applied. We introduce STARS, which combines a static capability prior, a request-conditioned invocation risk model, and a calibrated risk-fusion policy. To evaluate this setting, we construct SIA-Bench, a benchmark of 3,000 invocation records with group-safe splits, lineage metadata, runtime context, canonical action labels, and derived continuous-risk targets. On a held-out split of indirect prompt injection attacks, calibrated fusion reaches 0.439 high-risk AUPRC, improving over 0.405 for the contextual scorer and 0.380 for the strongest static baseline, while the contextual scorer remains better calibrated with 0.289 expected calibration error. On the locked in-distribution test split, gains are smaller and static priors remain useful. The resulting claim is therefore narrower: request-conditioned auditing is most valuable as an invocation-time risk-scoring and triage layer rather than as a replacement for static screening. Code is available at https://github.com/123zgj123/STARS.

The accelerating deployment of artificial intelligence systems across regulated sectors has exposed critical fragmentation in risk assessment methodologies. A significant "language barrier" currently separates technical security teams, who focus on algorithmic vulnerabilities (e.g., MITRE ATLAS), from legal and compliance professionals, who address regulatory mandates (e.g., EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF). This disciplinary disconnect prevents the accurate translation of technical vulnerabilities into financial liability, leaving practitioners unable to answer fundamental economic questions regarding contingency reserves, control return-on-investment, and insurance exposure. To bridge this gap, this research presents the AI System Threat Vector Taxonomy, a structured ontology designed explicitly for Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA). The framework categorizes AI-specific risks into nine critical domains: Misuse, Poisoning, Privacy, Adversarial, Biases, Unreliable Outputs, Drift, Supply Chain, and IP Threat, integrating 53 operationally defined sub-threats. Uniquely, each domain maps technical vectors directly to business loss categories (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Legal, Reputation), enabling the translation of abstract threats into measurable financial impact. The taxonomy is empirically validated through an analysis of 133 documented AI incidents from 2025 (achieving 100% classification coverage) and reconciled against the main AI risk frameworks. Furthermore, it is explicitly aligned with ISO/IEC 42001 controls and NIST AI RMF functions to facilitate auditability.

Existing LLM safety evaluations rely on binary attack-success rates and domain-agnostic taxonomies, leaving regulated Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) deployments exposed to failures elicited through legally or professionally plausible framing. We introduce RAHS (Risk-Adjusted Harm Score), a risk-sensitive metric jointly capturing disclosure severity, disclaimer mitigation, and inter-judge agreement, and FinRedTeamBench, a 989-prompt benchmark spanning seven BFSI risk areas and 34 sub-categories mapped to regulatory frameworks. Evaluation uses an ensemble of three heterogeneous LLM judges, validated against human experts, and an adaptive multi-turn red-teaming pipeline. On nine open-weight models, RAHS preserves separation under near-ceiling ASR, ranking is stable under hyperparameter sweeps, and multi-turn pressure drives not only more jailbreaks but more operationally severe disclosures, exposing failure modes that single-turn, domain-agnostic evaluations cannot reveal.

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.

This report describes ARIS (Auto-Research-in-sleep), an open-source research harness for autonomous research, including its architecture, assurance mechanisms, and early deployment experience. The performance of agent systems built on LLMs depends on both the model weights and the harness around them, which governs what information to store, retrieve, and present to the model. For long-horizon research workflows, the central failure mode is not a visible breakdown but a plausible unsupported success: a long-running agent can produce claims whose evidential support is incomplete, misreported, or silently inherited from the executor's framing. Therefore, we present ARIS as a research harness that coordinates machine-learning research workflows through cross-model adversarial collaboration as a default configuration: an executor model drives forward progress while a reviewer from a different model family is recommended to critique intermediate artifacts and request revisions. ARIS has three architectural layers. The execution layer provides more than 65 reusable Markdown-defined skills, model integrations via MCP, a persistent research wiki for iterative reuse of prior findings, and deterministic figure generation. The orchestration layer coordinates five end-to-end workflows with adjustable effort settings and configurable routing to reviewer models. The assurance layer includes a three-stage process for checking whether experimental claims are supported by evidence: integrity verification, result-to-claim mapping, and claim auditing that cross-checks manuscript statements against the claim ledger and raw evidence, as well as a five-pass scientific-editing pipeline, mathematical-proof checks, and visual inspection of the rendered PDF. A prototype self-improvement loop records research traces and proposes harness improvements that are adopted only after reviewer approval.

E-commerce risk management requires aggregating diverse, deeply embedded web data through multi-step, stateful interactions, which traditional scraping methods and most existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents cannot handle. These agents are typically limited to single-step tasks and lack the ability to manage dynamic, interactive content critical for effective risk assessment. To address this challenge, we introduce RISK, a novel framework designed to build and deploy GUI agents for this domain. RISK integrates three components: (1) RISK-Data, a dataset of 8,492 single-step and 2,386 multi-step interaction trajectories, collected through a high-fidelity browser framework and a meticulous data curation process; (2) RISK-Bench, a benchmark with 802 single-step and 320 multi-step trajectories across three difficulty levels for standardized evaluation; and (3) RISK-R1, a R1-style reinforcement fine-tuning framework considering four aspects: (i) Output Format Constraint, (ii) Single-step and (iii) Multi-step Level Reward, and (iv) Task Level Reweight. Experiments show that RISK-R1 achieves a 6.8% improvement in offline single-step and an 8.8% improvement in offline multi-step, using only 7.2% of the parameters of the SOTA baseline. Moreover, it attains a top task success rate of 70.5% in online evaluation. RISK provides a scalable, domain-specific solution for automating complex web interactions in e-commerce risk management. The code is available at https://github.com/RenqiChen/RISK-GUI.

The rapid evolution of generative AI has expanded the breadth of risks associated with AI systems. While various taxonomies and frameworks exist to classify these risks, the lack of interoperability between them creates challenges for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to operationalise AI governance. To address this gap, we introduce the AI Risk Atlas, a structured taxonomy that consolidates AI risks from diverse sources and aligns them with governance frameworks. Additionally, we present the Risk Atlas Nexus, a collection of open-source tools designed to bridge the divide between risk definitions, benchmarks, datasets, and mitigation strategies. This knowledge-driven approach leverages ontologies and knowledge graphs to facilitate risk identification, prioritization, and mitigation. By integrating AI-assisted compliance workflows and automation strategies, our framework lowers the barrier to responsible AI adoption. We invite the broader research and open-source community to contribute to this evolving initiative, fostering cross-domain collaboration and ensuring AI governance keeps pace with technological advancements.

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.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is reshaping how large language models (LLMs) acquire reasoning capabilities, yet the optimizers used remain largely inherited from teacher-forcing training. This raises a fundamental question: does RLVR induce a distinct optimization geometry that calls for a different optimizer? We investigate this question through the spectral structure of LLM gradients and find that gradient energy progressively concentrates into a shrinking effective subspace, which is characteristic of RLVR, as it is absent under supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and is largely removed when the verifiable reward is replaced by a random one. Moreover, the rank required to capture a fixed fraction of gradient energy steadily decreases over training, revealing that the effective dimensionality of useful updates itself evolves with training. These findings motivate a new optimization principle: rather than prescribing the update rank externally, an optimizer should adapt its rank to the evolving spectral structure of the gradient. We introduce Ares (Adaptive Rank-Effective Spectral Optimization), which estimates the effective update rank from the gradient's spectral energy distribution, tracks its evolution, and confines the gradient signal driving each update to the resulting low-rank subspace. Across LLMs of different scales, Ares improves accuracy over widely used optimizers and generalizes across RLVR algorithms and tasks. Results suggest that effective optimization may require optimizers to be designed around the geometry and dynamics of the training process. We release the code and data at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Ares.

The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse sectors has marked a transformative era, showcasing remarkable capabilities in text generation and problem-solving tasks. However, this technological advancement is accompanied by significant risks and vulnerabilities. Despite ongoing security enhancements, attackers persistently exploit these weaknesses, casting doubts on the overall trustworthiness of LLMs. Compounding the issue, organisations are deploying LLM-integrated systems without understanding the severity of potential consequences. Existing studies by OWASP and MITRE offer a general overview of threats and vulnerabilities but lack a method for directly and succinctly analysing the risks for security practitioners, developers, and key decision-makers who are working with this novel technology. To address this gap, we propose a risk assessment process using tools like the OWASP risk rating methodology which is used for traditional systems. We conduct scenario analysis to identify potential threat agents and map the dependent system components against vulnerability factors. Through this analysis, we assess the likelihood of a cyberattack. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough impact analysis to derive a comprehensive threat matrix. We also map threats against three key stakeholder groups: developers engaged in model fine-tuning, application developers utilizing third-party APIs, and end users. The proposed threat matrix provides a holistic evaluation of LLM-related risks, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions for effective mitigation strategies. Our outlined process serves as an actionable and comprehensive tool for security practitioners, offering insights for resource management and enhancing the overall system security.

Selective Classification, wherein models can reject low-confidence predictions, promises reliable translation of machine-learning based classification systems to real-world scenarios such as clinical diagnostics. While current evaluation of these systems typically assumes fixed working points based on pre-defined rejection thresholds, methodological progress requires benchmarking the general performance of systems akin to the AUROC in standard classification. In this work, we define 5 requirements for multi-threshold metrics in selective classification regarding task alignment, interpretability, and flexibility, and show how current approaches fail to meet them. We propose the Area under the Generalized Risk Coverage curve (AUGRC), which meets all requirements and can be directly interpreted as the average risk of undetected failures. We empirically demonstrate the relevance of AUGRC on a comprehensive benchmark spanning 6 data sets and 13 confidence scoring functions. We find that the proposed metric substantially changes metric rankings on 5 out of the 6 data sets.

Robust planning in interactive scenarios requires predicting the uncertain future to make risk-aware decisions. Unfortunately, due to long-tail safety-critical events, the risk is often under-estimated by finite-sampling approximations of probabilistic motion forecasts. This can lead to overconfident and unsafe robot behavior, even with robust planners. Instead of assuming full prediction coverage that robust planners require, we propose to make prediction itself risk-aware. We introduce a new prediction objective to learn a risk-biased distribution over trajectories, so that risk evaluation simplifies to an expected cost estimation under this biased distribution. This reduces the sample complexity of the risk estimation during online planning, which is needed for safe real-time performance. Evaluation results in a didactic simulation environment and on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code and a demo are available.

Recursive self-improvement, the participation of AI systems in improving their own capabilities, is beginning to move from theoretical prospect to practice, posing both challenges and opportunities for safety alignment. Models evolve through frequent updates, and their safety alignment requires continual adaptation to each new checkpoint. Meanwhile, with evolving red-teaming methods exposing new vulnerabilities, safety improvement for each checkpoint needs to mitigate exposed vulnerabilities and generalize to risks not yet revealed. Following R^2AI, we term these goals resistance to known threats and resilience to unforeseen risks. Recursive self-improvement, in turn, inspires an approach to both goals: safety alignment could likewise advance through successive rounds of evaluation and update. We therefore introduce ReSI, a recursive safety improvement framework that implements this approach through automated research. In each round, ReSI applies diverse red-teaming methods to identify vulnerabilities in the current target model, develops training recipes, and promotes the update with the largest safety gain among those passing a Pareto gate on capability retention as the next target model. Across four dense and mixture-of-experts models, ReSI matches or exceeds evaluated frontier models on in-distribution and out-of-distribution safety benchmarks, and outperforms alignment baselines on nearly all safety evaluations while largely preserving general capabilities. In particular, ReSI reduces the mean X-Teaming attack success rate across the four models from 86.01% to 31.45%, well below GPT-5.6-Luna's leading frontier result of 56.69%, indicating stronger resilience to attacks unseen during training. These findings support recursive safety improvement as a practical path toward resistant and resilient AI.

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.

Existing agent-safety evaluation has focused mainly on externally induced risks. Yet agents may still enter unsafe trajectories under benign conditions. We study this complementary but underexplored setting through the lens of intrinsic risk, where intrinsic failures remain latent, propagate across long-horizon execution, and eventually lead to high-consequence outcomes. To evaluate this setting, we introduce non-attack intrinsic risk auditing and present HINTBench, a benchmark of 629 agent trajectories (523 risky, 106 safe; 33 steps on average) supporting three tasks: risk detection, risk-step localization, and intrinsic failure-type identification. Its annotations are organized under a unified five-constraint taxonomy. Experiments reveal a substantial capability gap: strong LLMs perform well on trajectory-level risk detection, but their performance drops to below 35 Strict-F1 on risk-step localization, while fine-grained failure diagnosis proves even harder. Existing guard models transfer poorly to this setting. These findings establish intrinsic risk auditing as an open challenge for agent safety.

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

Ensuring safety in Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically framed as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), is crucial for real-world exploration applications. Current approaches in handling CMDP struggle to balance optimality and feasibility, as direct optimization methods cannot ensure state-wise in-training safety, and projection-based methods correct actions inefficiently through lengthy iterations. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Chance-constrained Safeguards (ACS), an adaptive, model-free safe RL algorithm using the safety recovery rate as a surrogate chance constraint to iteratively ensure safety during exploration and after achieving convergence. Theoretical analysis indicates that the relaxed probabilistic constraint sufficiently guarantees forward invariance to the safe set. And extensive experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world safety-critical tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in enforcing safety (nearly zero-violation) while preserving optimality (+23.8%), robustness, and fast response in stochastic real-world settings.

As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

Generative models trained using self-supervision of tokenized electronic health record (EHR) timelines show promise for clinical outcome prediction. This is typically done using Monte Carlo simulation for future patient trajectories. However, existing approaches suffer from three key limitations: sparse estimate distributions that poorly differentiate patient risk levels, extreme computational costs, and high sampling variance. We propose two new estimators: the Sum of Conditional Outcome Probability Estimator (SCOPE) and Risk Estimation from Anticipated Conditional Hazards (REACH), that leverage next-token probability distributions discarded by standard Monte Carlo. We prove both estimators are unbiased and that REACH guarantees variance reduction over Monte Carlo sampling for any model and outcome. Empirically, on hospital mortality prediction in MIMIC-IV using the ETHOS-ARES framework, SCOPE and REACH match 100-sample Monte Carlo performance using only 10-11 samples (95% CI: [9,11]), representing a ~10x reduction in inference cost without degrading calibration. For ICU admission prediction, efficiency gains are more modest (~1.2x), which we attribute to the outcome's lower "spontaneity," a property we characterize theoretically and empirically. These methods substantially improve the feasibility of deploying generative EHR models in resource-constrained clinical settings.

This paper introduces a dynamic and actionable framework for securing agentic AI systems in enterprise deployment. We contend that safety and security are not merely fixed attributes of individual models but also emergent properties arising from the dynamic interactions among models, orchestrators, tools, and data within their operating environments. We propose a new way of identification of novel agentic risks through the lens of user safety. Although, for traditional LLMs and agentic models in isolation, safety and security has a clear separation, through the lens of safety in agentic systems, they appear to be connected. Building on this foundation, we define an operational agentic risk taxonomy that unifies traditional safety and security concerns with novel, uniquely agentic risks, including tool misuse, cascading action chains, and unintended control amplification among others. At the core of our approach is a dynamic agentic safety and security framework that operationalizes contextual agentic risk management by using auxiliary AI models and agents, with human oversight, to assist in contextual risk discovery, evaluation, and mitigation. We further address one of the most challenging aspects of safety and security of agentic systems: risk discovery through sandboxed, AI-driven red teaming. We demonstrate the framework effectiveness through a detailed case study of NVIDIA flagship agentic research assistant, AI-Q Research Assistant, showcasing practical, end-to-end safety and security evaluations in complex, enterprise-grade agentic workflows. This risk discovery phase finds novel agentic risks that are then contextually mitigated. We also release the dataset from our case study, containing traces of over 10,000 realistic attack and defense executions of the agentic workflow to help advance research in agentic safety.

LLM agents increasingly perform autonomous actions through external tools, leading to complex and evolving safety risks. However, existing safety testing targets expert-designed safety violations, and the corresponding outcomes are evaluated by hard-coded rules, making them costly to extend as agents evolve. To this end, we present Vera, an end-to-end automated safety testing framework that instantiates software engineering testing principles for non-deterministic agents through a three-stage, self-reinforcing pipeline. First, a literature-driven exploration continuously discovers and structures emerging risks into taxonomies of safety risks, attack methods, and tool execution environments. Second, combinatorial composition across taxonomy dimensions produces executable safety cases, each specifying a concrete safety goal, a programmatically constructed initial state, and a deterministic verification predicate grounded in observable artifacts. Third, adaptive execution runs heterogeneous agents in isolated sandboxes where a control agent steers multi-turn interaction based on runtime observations, while evidence-grounded verifiers judge outcomes from environment state and tool-call evidence rather than model self-report. We evaluate Vera on four production agent frameworks (OpenClaw, Hermes, Codex, Claude Code), revealing substantial safety weaknesses, with average attack success rates reaching 93.9\% under multi-channel attacks; we also release Vera-Bench, comprising 1600 executable safety cases spanning 124 risk categories across three execution settings. These results indicate that modular, executable testing infrastructure is essential for rigorous and maintainable safety evaluation of rapidly evolving agentic systems at scale. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yunhao-Feng/Vera.

Agentic AI systems are increasingly being explored in medical imaging to improve throughput and reduce clinician workload; however, safe deployment remains challenging because autonomous errors may propagate into downstream clinical decisions. A central requirement is therefore not only strong predictive performance, but also a reliable routing mechanism that determines when the system should proceed autonomously and when a case should be escalated for further review. To address this gap, we propose CRC-Router, a risk-constrained, uncertainty-aware routing module that is applicable to both conventional medical prediction models and agentic medical AI systems. CRC-Router combines multiple complementary uncertainty signals with the predictive score to construct a per-finding routing feature vector, maps this vector to an estimated wrong-accept risk using a lightweight per-finding risk model, and then applies Conformal Risk Control (CRC) to calibrate acceptance thresholds under a user-specified risk target. Instantiated on chest X-ray multi-finding triage using the NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset, CRC-Router achieves the strongest empirical risk--coverage trade-off among the evaluated baselines, both as a standalone routing layer and as a plug-in module integrated with the state-of-the-art MedRAX agent. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness of CRC-Router in selective medical automation and its modular, model-agnostic compatibility with existing predictive and agentic medical pipelines. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/XLIAaron/CRC-Router

The United States Department of Defense (DOD) looks to accelerate the development and deployment of AI capabilities across a wide spectrum of defense applications to maintain strategic advantages. However, many common features of AI algorithms that make them powerful, such as capacity for learning, large-scale data ingestion, and problem-solving, raise new technical, security, and ethical challenges. These challenges may hinder adoption due to uncertainty in development, testing, assurance, processes, and requirements. Trustworthiness through assurance is essential to achieve the expected value from AI. This paper proposes a claims-based framework for risk management and assurance of AI systems that addresses the competing needs for faster deployment, successful adoption, and rigorous evaluation. This framework supports programs across all acquisition pathways provide grounds for sufficient confidence that an AI-enabled system (AIES) meets its intended mission goals without introducing unacceptable risks throughout its lifecycle. The paper's contributions are a framework process for AI assurance, a set of relevant definitions to enable constructive conversations on the topic of AI assurance, and a discussion of important considerations in AI assurance. The framework aims to provide the DOD a robust yet efficient mechanism for swiftly fielding effective AI capabilities without overlooking critical risks or undermining stakeholder trust.

The rapid development of autonomous web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), while greatly elevating efficiency, exposes the frontier risk of taking unintended or harmful actions. This situation underscores an urgent need for effective safety measures, akin to access controls for human users. To address this critical challenge, we introduce WebGuard, the first comprehensive dataset designed to support the assessment of web agent action risks and facilitate the development of guardrails for real-world online environments. In doing so, WebGuard specifically focuses on predicting the outcome of state-changing actions and contains 4,939 human-annotated actions from 193 websites across 22 diverse domains, including often-overlooked long-tail websites. These actions are categorized using a novel three-tier risk schema: SAFE, LOW, and HIGH. The dataset includes designated training and test splits to support evaluation under diverse generalization settings. Our initial evaluations reveal a concerning deficiency: even frontier LLMs achieve less than 60% accuracy in predicting action outcomes and less than 60% recall in lagging HIGH-risk actions, highlighting the risks of deploying current-generation agents without dedicated safeguards. We therefore investigate fine-tuning specialized guardrail models using WebGuard. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple generalization settings and find that a fine-tuned Qwen2.5VL-7B model yields a substantial improvement in performance, boosting accuracy from 37% to 80% and HIGH-risk action recall from 20% to 76%. Despite these improvements, the performance still falls short of the reliability required for high-stakes deployment, where guardrails must approach near-perfect accuracy and recall.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives. The increase in computational power and data availability has led to a proliferation of both single- and multi-modal models. As the GenAI ecosystem matures, the need for extensible and model-agnostic risk identification frameworks is growing. To meet this need, we introduce the Python Risk Identification Toolkit (PyRIT), an open-source framework designed to enhance red teaming efforts in GenAI systems. PyRIT is a model- and platform-agnostic tool that enables red teamers to probe for and identify novel harms, risks, and jailbreaks in multimodal generative AI models. Its composable architecture facilitates the reuse of core building blocks and allows for extensibility to future models and modalities. This paper details the challenges specific to red teaming generative AI systems, the development and features of PyRIT, and its practical applications in real-world scenarios.

Modern software systems are guided by hierarchical architectural concepts -- software architectures, reference architectures, and architectural frameworks -- each operating at a distinct level of abstraction. These artifacts promote reuse, scalability, and consistency, but also embed tradeoffs that shape critical quality attributes such as modifiability, performance, and security. Existing evaluation methods, such as the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), focus on system-specific architectures and are not designed to address the broader generality and variability of higher-level architectural forms. To close this gap, we introduce the Architecture Tradeoff and Risk Analysis Framework (ATRAF) -- a unified, scenario-driven framework for evaluating tradeoffs and risks across architectural levels. ATRAF encompasses three methods: the Architecture Tradeoff and Risk Analysis Method (ATRAM), extending ATAM with enhanced risk identification for concrete systems; the Reference Architecture Tradeoff and Risk Analysis Method (RATRAM), adapting ATRAM to the evaluation of domain-level reference architectures; and the Architectural Framework Tradeoff and Risk Analysis Method (AFTRAM), supporting the evaluation of architectural frameworks that guide entire system families. All three methods follow an iterative spiral process that enables the identification of sensitivities, tradeoffs, and risks while supporting continuous refinement of architectural artifacts. We demonstrate ATRAF through progressively abstracted examples derived from the Remote Temperature Sensor (RTS) case, originally introduced in the ATAM literature. ATRAF equips architects, reference modelers, and framework designers with a practical, systematic approach for analyzing design alternatives and managing quality attribute tradeoffs early in the lifecycle and across all levels of architectural abstraction.

For one to guarantee higher-quality software development processes, risk management is essential. Furthermore, risks are those that could negatively impact an organization's operations or a project's progress. The appropriate prioritisation of software project risks is a crucial factor in ascertaining the software project's performance features and eventual success. They can be used harmoniously with the same training samples and have good complement and compatibility. We carried out in-depth tests on four benchmark datasets to confirm the efficacy of our CIA approach in closed-world and open-world scenarios, with and without defence. We also present a sequential augmentation parameter optimisation technique that captures the interdependencies of the latest deep learning state-of-the-art WF attack models. To achieve precise software risk assessment, the enhanced crow search algorithm (ECSA) is used to modify the ANFIS settings. Solutions that very slightly alter the local optimum and stay inside it are extracted using the ECSA. ANFIS variable when utilising the ANFIS technique. An experimental validation with NASA 93 dataset and 93 software project values was performed. This method's output presents a clear image of the software risk elements that are essential to achieving project performance. The results of our experiments show that, when compared to other current methods, our integrative fuzzy techniques may perform more accurately and effectively in the evaluation of software project risks.

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.

When fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human values and intentions, maximizing the estimated reward can lead to superior performance, but it also introduces potential risks due to deviations from the reference model's intended behavior. Most existing methods typically introduce KL divergence to constrain deviations between the trained model and the reference model; however, this may not be sufficient in certain applications that require tight risk control. In this paper, we introduce Risk-aware Direct Preference Optimization (Ra-DPO), a novel approach that incorporates risk-awareness by employing a class of nested risk measures. This approach formulates a constrained risk-aware advantage function maximization problem and then converts the Bradley-Terry model into a token-level representation. The objective function maximizes the likelihood of the policy while suppressing the deviation between a trained model and the reference model using a sequential risk ratio, thereby enhancing the model's risk-awareness. Experimental results across three open-source datasets: IMDb Dataset, Anthropic HH Dataset, and AlpacaEval, demonstrate the proposed method's superior performance in balancing alignment performance and model drift. Our code is opensourced at https://github.com/zlj123-max/Ra-DPO.

With the widespread deployment of Computer-using Agents (CUAs) in complex real-world environments, prevalent long-term risks often lead to severe and irreversible consequences. Most existing guardrails for CUAs adopt a reactive approach, constraining agent behavior only within the current observation space. While these guardrails can prevent immediate short-term risks (e.g., clicking on a phishing link), they cannot proactively avoid long-term risks: seemingly reasonable actions can lead to high-risk consequences that emerge with a delay (e.g., cleaning logs leads to future audits being untraceable), which reactive guardrails cannot identify within the current observation space. To address these limitations, we propose a predictive guardrail approach, with the core idea of aligning predicted future risks with current decisions. Based on this approach, we present SafePred, a predictive guardrail framework for CUAs that establishes a risk-to-decision loop to ensure safe agent behavior. SafePred supports two key abilities: (1) Short- and long-term risk prediction: by using safety policies as the basis for risk prediction, SafePred leverages the prediction capability of the world model to generate semantic representations of both short-term and long-term risks, thereby identifying and pruning actions that lead to high-risk states; (2) Decision optimization: translating predicted risks into actionable safe decision guidances through step-level interventions and task-level re-planning. Extensive experiments show that SafePred significantly reduces high-risk behaviors, achieving over 97.6% safety performance and improving task utility by up to 21.4% compared with reactive baselines.

Agentic AI is advancing rapidly, yet truly autonomous medical-imaging triage, where a system decides when to stop, escalate, or defer under real constraints, remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AT-CXR, an uncertainty-aware agent for chest X-rays. The system estimates per-case confidence and distributional fit, then follows a stepwise policy to issue an automated decision or abstain with a suggested label for human intervention. We evaluate two router designs that share the same inputs and actions: a deterministic rule-based router and an LLM-decided router. Across five-fold evaluation on a balanced subset of NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset, both variants outperform strong zero-shot vision-language models and state-of-the-art supervised classifiers, achieving higher full-coverage accuracy and superior selective-prediction performance, evidenced by a lower area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC) and a lower error rate at high coverage, while operating with lower latency that meets practical clinical constraints. The two routers provide complementary operating points, enabling deployments to prioritize maximal throughput or maximal accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/XLIAaron/uncertainty-aware-cxr-agent.

Successful defense against dynamically evolving cyber threats requires advanced and sophisticated techniques. This research presents a novel approach to enhance real-time cybersecurity threat detection and response by integrating large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems with continuous threat intelligence feeds. Leveraging recent advancements in LLMs, specifically GPT-4o, and the innovative application of RAG techniques, our approach addresses the limitations of traditional static threat analysis by incorporating dynamic, real-time data sources. We leveraged RAG to get the latest information in real-time for threat intelligence, which is not possible in the existing GPT-4o model. We employ the Patrowl framework to automate the retrieval of diverse cybersecurity threat intelligence feeds, including Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), and Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) databases, and integrate these with the all-mpnet-base-v2 model for high-dimensional vector embeddings, stored and queried in Milvus. We demonstrate our system's efficacy through a series of case studies, revealing significant improvements in addressing recently disclosed vulnerabilities, KEVs, and high-EPSS-score CVEs compared to the baseline GPT-4o. This work not only advances the role of LLMs in cybersecurity but also establishes a robust foundation for the development of automated intelligent cyberthreat information management systems, addressing crucial gaps in current cybersecurity practices.

Landmines remain a threat to war-affected communities for years after conflicts have ended, partly due to the laborious nature of demining tasks. Humanitarian demining operations begin by collecting relevant information from the sites to be cleared, which is then analyzed by human experts to determine the potential risk of remaining landmines. In this paper, we propose RELand system to support these tasks, which consists of three major components. We (1) provide general feature engineering and label assigning guidelines to enhance datasets for landmine risk modeling, which are widely applicable to global demining routines, (2) formulate landmine presence as a classification problem and design a novel interpretable model based on sparse feature masking and invariant risk minimization, and run extensive evaluation under proper protocols that resemble real-world demining operations to show a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art, and (3) build an interactive web interface to suggest priority areas for demining organizations. We are currently collaborating with a humanitarian demining NGO in Colombia that is using our system as part of their field operations in two areas recently prioritized for demining.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs rely on sparse, router-driven expert activation, yet how safety alignment interacts with routed expert specialization remains underexplored. A common intuition is that safety behavior may be controlled by routing harmful requests to distinct refusal-oriented experts. In this work, we provide empirical evidence for a different picture: routing patterns in aligned MoE LLMs are largely topic-driven, while safety behavior can be altered with little change to the model's intrinsic routing path. Motivated by this observation, we present RASET (Router-Agnostic Safety-Critical Expert Tuning), a red-teaming framework that probes safety enforcement that is localized in a small subset of experts while preserving the model's intrinsic routing behavior. RASET identifies safety-critical experts via a contrastive routing-sensitivity criterion and applies parameter-efficient tuning only to the selected experts, minimizing semantic disruption relative to router-steering interventions. Across five open-weight MoE backbones, RASET achieves high-quality safety-bypass yield (50.5% average ASR_{hq}, +37.6 points over the strongest baseline). These results reveal a distinct MoE safety risk, highlighting the need for expert-aware alignment mechanisms.

Ensuring the safety of LLM-generated content is essential for real-world deployment. Most existing guardrail models formulate moderation as a fixed binary classification task, implicitly assuming a fixed definition of harmfulness. In practice, enforcement strictness - how conservatively harmfulness is defined and enforced - varies across platforms and evolves over time, making binary moderators brittle under shifting requirements. We first introduce FlexBench, a strictness-adaptive LLM moderation benchmark that enables controlled evaluation under multiple strictness regimes. Experiments on FlexBench reveal substantial cross-strictness inconsistency in existing moderators: models that perform well under one regime can degrade substantially under others, limiting their practical usability. To address this, we propose FlexGuard, an LLM-based moderator that outputs a calibrated continuous risk score reflecting risk severity and supports strictness-specific decisions via thresholding. We train FlexGuard via risk-alignment optimization to improve score-severity consistency and provide practical threshold selection strategies to adapt to target strictness at deployment. Experiments on FlexBench and public benchmarks demonstrate that FlexGuard achieves higher moderation accuracy and substantially improved robustness under varying strictness. We release the source code and data to support reproducibility.

Conformal prediction is a statistical framework that generates prediction sets containing ground-truth labels with a desired coverage guarantee. The predicted probabilities produced by machine learning models are generally miscalibrated, leading to large prediction sets in conformal prediction. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm named Sorted Adaptive Prediction Sets (SAPS), which discards all the probability values except for the maximum softmax probability. The key idea behind SAPS is to minimize the dependence of the non-conformity score on the probability values while retaining the uncertainty information. In this manner, SAPS can produce compact prediction sets and communicate instance-wise uncertainty. Extensive experiments validate that SAPS not only lessens the prediction sets but also broadly enhances the conditional coverage rate of prediction sets.

Reliable risk identification based on driver behavior data underpins real-time safety feedback, fleet risk management, and evaluation of driver-assist systems. While naturalistic driving studies have become foundational for providing real-world driver behavior data, the existing frameworks for identifying risk based on such data have two fundamental limitations: (i) they rely on predefined time windows and fixed thresholds to disentangle risky and normal driving behavior, and (ii) they assume behavior is stationary across drivers and time, ignoring heterogeneity and temporal drift. In practice, these limitations can lead to timing errors and miscalibration in alerts, weak generalization to new drivers/routes/conditions, and higher false-alarm and miss rates, undermining driver trust and reducing safety intervention effectiveness. To address this gap, we propose a unified, context-aware framework that adapts labels and models over time and across drivers via rolling windows, joint optimization, dynamic calibration, and model fusion, tailored for time-stamped kinematic data. The framework is tested using two safety indicators, speed-weighted headway and harsh driving events, and three models: Random Forest, XGBoost, and Deep Neural Network (DNN). Speed-weighted headway yielded more stable and context-sensitive classifications than harsh-event counts. XGBoost maintained consistent performance under changing thresholds, whereas DNN achieved higher recall at lower thresholds but with greater variability across trials. The ensemble aggregated signals from multiple models into a single risk decision, balancing responsiveness to risky behavior with control of false alerts. Overall, the framework shows promise for adaptive, context-aware risk detection that can enhance real-time safety feedback and support driver-focused interventions in intelligent transportation systems.

Tool-using agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across web, app, operating-system, and transactional environments. Yet existing safety benchmarks still emphasize explicit risks, potentially overstating a model's ability to judge deceptive or ambiguous trajectories. To address this gap, we introduce ROME (Red-team Orchestrated Multi-agent Evolution), a controlled benchmark-construction pipeline that rewrites known unsafe trajectories into more deceptive evaluation instances while preserving their underlying risk labels. Starting from 100 unsafe source trajectories, ROME produces 300 challenge instances spanning contextual ambiguity, implicit risks, and shortcut decision-making. Experiments show that these challenge sets substantially degrade safety-judgment performance, with hidden-risk cases remaining particularly non-trivial even for recent frontier models. We further study ARISE (Analogical Reasoning for Inference-time Safety Enhancement), a retrieval-guided inference-time enhancement that retrieves ReAct-style analogical safety trajectories from an external analogical base and injects them as structured reasoning exemplars. ARISE improves judgment quality without retraining, but is best viewed as a task-specific robustness enhancement rather than a standalone safety guarantee. Together, ROME and ARISE provide practical tools for stress-testing and improving agent safety judgment under deceptive distribution shifts.

Evaluating the safety of LLM-based agents is increasingly important because risks in realistic deployments often emerge over multi-step interactions rather than isolated prompts or final responses. Existing trajectory-level benchmarks remain limited by insufficient interaction diversity, coarse observability of safety failures, and weak long-horizon realism. We introduce ATBench, a trajectory-level benchmark for structured, diverse, and realistic evaluation of agent safety. ATBench organizes agentic risk along three dimensions: risk source, failure mode, and real-world harm. Based on this taxonomy, we construct trajectories with heterogeneous tool pools and a long-context delayed-trigger protocol that captures realistic risk emergence across multiple stages. The benchmark contains 1,000 trajectories (503 safe and 497 unsafe), averaging 9.01 turns and 3.95k tokens, with 1,954 invoked tools drawn from pools spanning 2,084 available tools. Data quality is supported by rule-based and LLM-based filtering plus full human audit. Experiments on frontier LLMs, open-source models, and specialized guard systems show that ATBench is challenging even for strong evaluators, while enabling taxonomy-stratified analysis, cross-benchmark comparison, and diagnosis of long-horizon failure patterns.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS) in large enterprises can generate hundreds of thousands of alerts per hour, overwhelming analysts with logs requiring rapidly evolving expertise. Conventional machine-learning detectors reduce alert volume but still yield many false positives, while standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines often retrieve irrelevant context and fail to justify predictions. We present CyberRAG, a modular agent-based RAG framework that delivers real-time classification, explanation, and structured reporting for cyber-attacks. A central LLM agent orchestrates: (i) fine-tuned classifiers specialized by attack family; (ii) tool adapters for enrichment and alerting; and (iii) an iterative retrieval-and-reason loop that queries a domain-specific knowledge base until evidence is relevant and self-consistent. Unlike traditional RAG, CyberRAG adopts an agentic design that enables dynamic control flow and adaptive reasoning. This architecture autonomously refines threat labels and natural-language justifications, reducing false positives and enhancing interpretability. It is also extensible: new attack types can be supported by adding classifiers without retraining the core agent. CyberRAG was evaluated on SQL Injection, XSS, and SSTI, achieving over 94\% accuracy per class and a final classification accuracy of 94.92\% through semantic orchestration. Generated explanations reached 0.94 in BERTScore and 4.9/5 in GPT-4-based expert evaluation, with robustness preserved against adversarial and unseen payloads. These results show that agentic, specialist-oriented RAG can combine high detection accuracy with trustworthy, SOC-ready prose, offering a flexible path toward partially automated cyber-defense workflows.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into critical decision-making pipelines, a trend that raises the demand for robust and automated data analysis. Current approaches to dataset risk analysis are limited to manual auditing methods which involve time-consuming and complex tasks, whereas fully automated analysis based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) suffers from hallucinations and issues stemming from AI alignment. To this end, this work proposes a framework for dataset risk estimation that integrates Generative AI under human guidance and supervision, aiming to set the foundations for a future automated risk analysis paradigm. Our approach utilizes LLMs to identify semantic and structural properties in database schemata, subsequently propose clustering techniques, generate the code for them and finally interpret the produced results. The human supervisor guides the model on the desired analysis and ensures process integrity and alignment with the task's objectives. A proof of concept is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework's utility in producing meaningful results in risk assessment tasks.

As AI agents move from chat interfaces to systems that read private data, call tools, and execute multi-step workflows, guardrails become a last line of defense against concrete deployment harms. In these settings, guardrail failures are no longer merely answer-quality errors: they can leak secrets, authorize unsafe actions, or block legitimate work. The hardest failures are often contextual: whether an action is acceptable depends on local privacy norms, organizational policies, and user expectations that resist pre-deployment specification. This creates a practical gap: guardrails must adapt to their own operating environments, yet deployment feedback is typically limited to sparse, noisy user-reported failures, and repeated fine-tuning is often impractical. To address this gap, we propose LiSA (Lifelong Safety Adaptation), a conservative policy induction framework that improves a fixed base guardrail through structured memory. LiSA converts occasional failures into reusable policy abstractions so that sparse reports can generalize beyond individual cases, adds conflict-aware local rules to prevent overgeneralization in mixed-label contexts, and applies evidence-aware confidence gating via a posterior lower bound, so that memory reuse scales with accumulated evidence rather than empirical accuracy alone. Across PrivacyLens+, ConFaide+, and AgentHarm, LiSA consistently outperforms strong memory-based baselines under sparse feedback, remains robust under noisy user feedback even at 20% label-flip rates, and pushes the latency--performance frontier beyond backbone model scaling. Ultimately, LiSA offers a practical path to secure AI agents against the unpredictable long tail of real-world edge risks.

The rapid development of the AI agent communication protocols, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A), Agora, and Agent Network Protocol (ANP), is reshaping how AI agents communicate with tools, services, and each other. While these protocols support scalable multi-agent interaction and cross-organizational interoperability, their security principles remain understudied, and standardized threat modeling is limited; no protocol-centric risk assessment framework has been established yet. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of four emerging AI agent communication protocols. First, we develop a structured threat modeling analysis that examines protocol architectures, trust assumptions, interaction patterns, and lifecycle behaviors to identify protocol-specific and cross-protocol risk surfaces. Second, we introduce a qualitative risk assessment framework that identifies twelve protocol-level risks and evaluates security posture across the creation, operation, and update phases through systematic assessment of likelihood, impact, and overall protocol risk, with implications for secure deployment and future standardization. Third, we provide a measurement-driven case study on MCP that formalizes the risk of missing mandatory validation/attestation for executable components as a falsifiable security claim by quantifying wrong-provider tool execution under multi-server composition across representative resolver policies. Collectively, our results highlight key design-induced risk surfaces and provide actionable guidance for secure deployment and future standardization of agent communication ecosystems.

AI agents are increasingly deployed across diverse domains to automate complex workflows through long-horizon and high-stakes action executions. Due to their high capability and flexibility, such agents raise significant security and safety concerns. A growing number of real-world incidents have shown that adversaries can easily manipulate agents into performing harmful actions, such as leaking API keys, deleting user data, or initiating unauthorized transactions. Evaluating agent security is inherently challenging, as agents operate in dynamic, untrusted environments involving external tools, heterogeneous data sources, and frequent user interactions. However, realistic, controllable, and reproducible environments for large-scale risk assessment remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the DecodingTrust-Agent Platform (DTap), the first controllable and interactive red-teaming platform for AI agents, spanning 14 real-world domains and over 50 simulation environments that replicate widely used systems such as Google Workspace, Paypal, and Slack. To scale the risk assessment of agents in DTap, we further propose DTap-Red, the first autonomous red-teaming agent that systematically explores diverse injection vectors (e.g., prompt, tool, skill, environment, combinations) and autonomously discovers effective attack strategies tailored to varying malicious goals. Using DTap-Red, we curate DTap-Bench, a large-scale red-teaming dataset comprising high-quality instances across domains, each paired with a verifiable judge to automatically validate attack outcomes. Through DTap, we conduct large-scale evaluations of popular AI agents built on various backbone models, spanning security policies, risk categories, and attack strategies, revealing systematic vulnerability patterns and providing valuable insights for developing secure next-generation agents.

Excellent tail performance is crucial for modern machine learning tasks, such as algorithmic fairness, class imbalance, and risk-sensitive decision making, as it ensures the effective handling of challenging samples within a dataset. Tail performance is also a vital determinant of success for personalized recommender systems to reduce the risk of losing users with low satisfaction. This study introduces a "safe" collaborative filtering method that prioritizes recommendation quality for less-satisfied users rather than focusing on the average performance. Our approach minimizes the conditional value at risk (CVaR), which represents the average risk over the tails of users' loss. To overcome computational challenges for web-scale recommender systems, we develop a robust yet practical algorithm that extends the most scalable method, implicit alternating least squares (iALS). Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates the excellent tail performance of our approach while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to exhibit vulnerabilities despite deliberate safety alignment efforts, posing significant risks to users and society. To safeguard against the risk of policy-violating content, system-level moderation via external guard models-designed to monitor LLM inputs and outputs and block potentially harmful content-has emerged as a prevalent mitigation strategy. Existing approaches of training guard models rely heavily on extensive human curated datasets and struggle with out-of-distribution threats, such as emerging harmful categories or jailbreak attacks. To address these limitations, we propose RSafe, an adaptive reasoning-based safeguard that conducts guided safety reasoning to provide robust protection within the scope of specified safety policies. RSafe operates in two stages: 1) guided reasoning, where it analyzes safety risks of input content through policy-guided step-by-step reasoning, and 2) reinforced alignment, where rule-based RL optimizes its reasoning paths to align with accurate safety prediction. This two-stage training paradigm enables RSafe to internalize safety principles to generalize safety protection capability over unseen or adversarial safety violation scenarios. During inference, RSafe accepts user-specified safety policies to provide enhanced safeguards tailored to specific safety requirements.

AI-generated imagery evolves faster than benchmark-specific detector evaluations, making a single score an incomplete account of generalization. This paper evaluates Neural Defend ARCAS 1B across benchmark families without benchmark-specific parameter updates. We retain native aggregation and supplement it with record-level measures, coverage accounting, and subgroup diagnostics. Each Results subsection identifies the release and evaluation population, reports the official metric, and describes observed error patterns. A combined analysis synthesizes shared patterns while preserving the distinction between native and pooled quantities. Cross-paper comparisons are restricted to aligned evidence; differences in release, population, preprocessing, training, or benchmark exposure are context rather than rank. The findings characterize performance on evaluated records, not universal reliability, calibration, attribution, or future adaptive attacks. By keeping benchmark-native outcomes distinct from pooled summaries, the study makes test-population, class-balance, and missing-record-coverage differences visible. It supports interpretation of detector results in research, platform-safety, and forensic-review settings, foregrounding traceable protocol conditions over claims or leaderboard comparisons.

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.

Machine unlearning (MU) seeks to eliminate the influence of specific training examples from deployed models. As large language models (LLMs) become widely used, managing risks arising from insufficient forgetting or utility loss is increasingly crucial. Current MU techniques lack effective mechanisms for evaluating and controlling these risks, hindering the selection of strategies that appropriately balance safety and utility, and raising trust concerns surrounding the "right to be forgotten." To address these issues, we propose FROC, a unified framework with Risk-Optimized Control for machine unlearning in LLMs. FROC is built around a conformal-style risk-control formulation that expresses a user-specified risk budget on unlearning behavior. This probability-based constraint enables FROC to compare MU strategies, identify feasible operating regions, and guide hyperparameter selection according to desired trade-offs between forgetting sufficiency and utility preservation. To operationalize this constraint, FROC introduces a smoothly varying continuous risk model that aggregates forgetting deficiency and utility degradation into a single configuration-level score. Building on conformal risk analysis, FROC computes (1) the Conformal Unlearning Risk (CUR), a data-driven estimated value on the probability that forgotten samples continue to influence model predictions, and (2) risk-controlled configuration sets, which identify unlearning hyperparameters that are valid under the specified risk budget. Experiments across multiple LLM MU methods demonstrate that FROC produces stable, interpretable risk landscapes and reveals consistent relationships between unlearning configurations, semantic shift, and utility impact. FROC reframes MU as a controllable, risk-aware process and offers a practical foundation for managing unlearning behavior in large-scale LLM deployments.

Enterprises adopting retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) face a recurring operational decision: promote, revise, or block a system version. The evidence is incomplete and the metrics come from fallible LLM judges. We report on AGO AI Quality Gate (AGO), an evidence-first quality-gate framework deployed in industrial RAG assessment engagements. AGO integrates four key components: a four-state decision model that treats missing data and judge errors as explicit outcomes; layered scoring combining deterministic checks, local guardrails, and structured LLM evaluation; a stratified beta-binomial gate that quantifies regression risk probabilistically; and a mandatory meta-evaluation protocol to validate the LLM judge before it influences decisions. Since engagement data is proprietary, we evaluate the judge layer on RAGBench, a public benchmark of 100k annotated RAG traces across 12 datasets. On identical stratified test samples (N=1200 per judge), a low-cost judge (gpt-4.1-nano) detects non-adherent answers barely above chance (AUROC 0.603 [0.570, 0.634]), despite producing flawless protocol output, while gpt-4o reaches 0.783 [0.756, 0.807] -- yet its per-domain performance still ranges from 0.62 to 0.88. A fixed-seed gate study spanning regression, no change, and improvement quantifies unsafe promotion, false-alarm cost, and improvement throughput. Under regression, the decision-grade profile reduces unsafe promotion to 22.2%-35.1%, against 29.3%-41.8% for a naive gate. These results support the design choices that judge quality must be measured per engagement and that point estimates alone are not a release decision.

As vision-language models (VLMs) gain prominence, their multimodal interfaces also introduce new safety vulnerabilities, making the safety evaluation challenging and critical. Existing red-teaming efforts are either restricted to a narrow set of adversarial patterns or depend heavily on manual engineering, lacking scalable exploration of emerging real-world VLM vulnerabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose ARMs, an adaptive red-teaming agent that systematically conducts comprehensive risk assessments for VLMs. Given a target harmful behavior or risk definition, ARMs automatically optimizes diverse red-teaming strategies with reasoning-enhanced multi-step orchestration, to effectively elicit harmful outputs from target VLMs. We propose 11 novel multimodal attack strategies, covering diverse adversarial patterns of VLMs (e.g., reasoning hijacking, contextual cloaking), and integrate 17 red-teaming algorithms into ARMs via model context protocol (MCP). To balance the diversity and effectiveness of the attack, we design a layered memory with an epsilon-greedy attack exploration algorithm. Extensive experiments on instance- and policy-based benchmarks show that ARMs achieves SOTA attack success rates, exceeding baselines by an average of 52.1% and surpassing 90% on Claude-4-Sonnet. We show that the diversity of red-teaming instances generated by ARMs is significantly higher, revealing emerging vulnerabilities in VLMs. Leveraging ARMs, we construct ARMs-Bench, a large-scale multimodal safety dataset comprising over 30K red-teaming instances spanning 51 diverse risk categories, grounded in both real-world multimodal threats and regulatory risks. Safety fine-tuning with ARMs-Bench substantially improves the robustness of VLMs while preserving their general utility, providing actionable guidance to improve multimodal safety alignment against emerging threats.

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

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

This paper introduces the Hazard-Aware System Card (HASC), a novel framework designed to enhance transparency and accountability in the development and deployment of AI systems. The HASC builds upon existing model card and system card concepts by integrating a comprehensive, dynamic record of an AI system's security and safety posture. The framework proposes a standardized system of identifiers, including a novel AI Safety Hazard (ASH) ID, to complement existing security identifiers like CVEs, allowing for clear and consistent communication of fixed flaws. By providing a single, accessible source of truth, the HASC empowers developers and stakeholders to make more informed decisions about AI system safety throughout its lifecycle. Ultimately, we also compare our proposed AI system cards with the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 standard and discuss how they can be used to complement each other, providing greater transparency and accountability for AI systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrating increasing prowess in cybersecurity applications, creating creating inherent risks alongside their potential for strengthening defenses. In this position paper, we argue that current efforts to evaluate risks posed by these capabilities are misaligned with the goal of understanding real-world impact. Evaluating LLM cybersecurity risk requires more than just measuring model capabilities -- it demands a comprehensive risk assessment that incorporates analysis of threat actor adoption behavior and potential for impact. We propose a risk assessment framework for LLM cyber capabilities and apply it to a case study of language models used as cybersecurity assistants. Our evaluation of frontier models reveals high compliance rates but moderate accuracy on realistic cyber assistance tasks. However, our framework suggests that this particular use case presents only moderate risk due to limited operational advantages and impact potential. Based on these findings, we recommend several improvements to align research priorities with real-world impact assessment, including closer academia-industry collaboration, more realistic modeling of attacker behavior, and inclusion of economic metrics in evaluations. This work represents an important step toward more effective assessment and mitigation of LLM-enabled cybersecurity risks.

Enterprise agents face safety risks that cannot be determined from individual actions alone. Existing safety benchmarks largely evaluate action-local risks, overlooking failures whose safety depends on workflow state. In such state-dependent risks, the same action may be safe in one context but violate policy in another. Hence, we introduce LatentRiskBench for evaluating such state-dependent risks in enterprise settings. It pairs risky trajectories with benign counterparts that share the same terminal action but differ in latent policy-relevant states, requiring models to reconstruct workflow context rather than rely on action-level cues. We also introduce new metrics for state-dependent risk evaluation, including a suite of residual risk (RR) measures. Experiments on the benchmark show that action-level evaluation detects only 0.09 of state-dependent violations, whereas state-level evaluation reaches 0.96. Existing guardrail methods largely overlook such risks unless they are explicitly applied to workflow states. Case studies on a commercial deployed scenario further show that the safety metrics embedded in the benchmark provide a more realistic measure of safety for enterprise agents. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/JingyueCong/LatentRiskBench.

As orbital populations grow, conjunction screening must search more object pairs for potential collision risks. Existing pipelines use early-stage filters, such as an apsis filter, to eliminate pairs whose orbital altitude ranges cannot produce a close approach. However, these filters apply the same fixed threshold to every object, making the screening unnecessarily conservative for well-constrained objects while potentially insufficient for objects with greater orbit-prediction uncertainty. In this work, we present an uncertainty-aware conjunction screening method that replaces a single fixed apsis threshold with object-specific thresholds derived from propagated radial uncertainty. The resulting thresholds vary across both objects and prediction time, becoming narrower when propagated uncertainty is small and wider when uncertainty grows. We pair this adaptive screening rule with a binary-search altitude sweep that makes resulting heterogeneous intervals efficient to evaluate at catalog scale with log-linear search complexity. We evaluate the method on 33,791 objects from the Space-Track General Perturbations (GP) catalog using the preceding eight public ephemeris snapshots and a seven-day prediction horizon. The adaptive sieve retains 162.8 million candidate pairs, reducing the candidate set by 28.78% relative to a fixed 50 km apsis threshold and by 71.48% relative to brute-force all-pairs screening. It retains all close approaches identified in two independently propagated reference sets. At the largest tested catalog size, the binary-search sweep is 27 times faster than exhaustive interval evaluation while returning the same candidate set. These results demonstrate that uncertainty-aware screening can substantially reduce the candidate burden passed to downstream conjunction analysis, providing a scalable path toward managing increasingly large and heterogeneous orbital populations.

While prior research has proposed a plethora of methods that build neural classifiers robust against adversarial robustness, practitioners are still reluctant to adopt them due to their unacceptably severe clean accuracy penalties. This paper significantly alleviates this accuracy-robustness trade-off by mixing the output probabilities of a standard classifier and a robust classifier, where the standard network is optimized for clean accuracy and is not robust in general. We show that the robust base classifier's confidence difference for correct and incorrect examples is the key to this improvement. In addition to providing intuitions and empirical evidence, we theoretically certify the robustness of the mixed classifier under realistic assumptions. Furthermore, we adapt an adversarial input detector into a mixing network that adaptively adjusts the mixture of the two base models, further reducing the accuracy penalty of achieving robustness. The proposed flexible method, termed "adaptive smoothing", can work in conjunction with existing or even future methods that improve clean accuracy, robustness, or adversary detection. Our empirical evaluation considers strong attack methods, including AutoAttack and adaptive attack. On the CIFAR-100 dataset, our method achieves an 85.21% clean accuracy while maintaining a 38.72% ell_infty-AutoAttacked (epsilon = 8/255) accuracy, becoming the second most robust method on the RobustBench CIFAR-100 benchmark as of submission, while improving the clean accuracy by ten percentage points compared with all listed models. The code that implements our method is available at https://github.com/Bai-YT/AdaptiveSmoothing.

Quantitative risk assessment in high-stakes domains relies on structured expert elicitation to estimate unobservable properties. The gold standard - the Delphi method - produces calibrated, auditable judgments but requires months of coordination and specialist time, placing rigorous risk assessment out of reach for most applications. We investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as scalable proxies for structured expert elicitation. We propose Scalable Delphi, adapting the classical protocol for LLMs with diverse expert personas, iterative refinement, and rationale sharing. Because target quantities are typically unobservable, we develop an evaluation framework based on necessary conditions: calibration against verifiable proxies, sensitivity to evidence, and alignment with human expert judgment. We evaluate in the domain of AI-augmented cybersecurity risk, using three capability benchmarks and independent human elicitation studies. LLM panels achieve strong correlations with benchmark ground truth (Pearson r=0.87-0.95), improve systematically as evidence is added, and align with human expert panels - in one comparison, closer to a human panel than the two human panels are to each other. This demonstrates that LLM-based elicitation can extend structured expert judgment to settings where traditional methods are infeasible, reducing elicitation time from months to minutes.

The inherent rigidity of fixed-size benchmarks makes them an inefficient tool for model evaluation. Diverse evaluation objectives, including model ranking, model selection and testing throughout development, demand varying levels of statistical power. The mismatch between fixed sample sizes and these diverse needs results in either excessive computational cost or compromised reliability - a critical concern for model evaluation. To overcome these limitations, we call for adoption of sequential testing in our field. We provide an adaptive evaluation framework, that provides a principled way to navigate the trade-off between efficiency and reliability in model evaluation. Our framework combines the established statistical paradigm of sequential testing with stopping criteria tailored to common evaluation needs such as diminishing returns detection, and minimum detectable effect size. We demonstrate its ability to adaptively manage the efficiency-reliability trade-off on the Open VLM Leaderboard, including, for example, a 80% reduction in computational cost compared to fixed-size evaluation (with a 2.5-point CI width allowance) while maintaining statistical significance.

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.

Safety in agentic systems is inherently sequential: whether an action is safe depends on prior actions, tool outputs, information disclosures, and interactions among agents. Recent work has shifted agent safety guardrails from post-hoc trajectory-level assessment toward step-level action diagnosis and proactive risk prediction, yet existing training objectives provide limited supervision for how step evidence accumulates over time and when it becomes sufficient to justify intervention. We propose \methodlong~(ASPO): a training framework for step-level timely intervention. Pre-fix level stage alignment allows crediting each decision at its own step: it compares each response with the other responses sampled at the same prefix and rewards the action that fits the stage, continuing before the risk is visible, asking while clarification can still avert harm, and stopping before harm is irreversible. Adaptive feedback self-distillation further credits the reasoning behind each decision, with the model itself as a teacher that sees the step annotations on intervention steps and rules mined from its own false alarms on safe steps. Its training data carry a violation taxonomy and an intervention window at every step and are extended through self-evolving multi-agent red-teaming. Finally we present StepSafe, a step-level reasoning guardrail with timely intervention, that achieves the state-of-the-art peformance among open-source guardrails across five agent-safety benchmarks on safety-utility pareto curve with Youden's J of 53.0 (4B) against 46.2.

Large language models are increasingly deployed through agent harnesses that manage tools, extensions, persistent state, permissions, and external actions. Existing safety benchmarks mainly target individual attack mechanisms or a limited subset of operational settings, making it difficult to compare how safety failures emerge across different harness responsibilities. We present HarnessRisk, a lifecycle oriented benchmark that organizes agent harness safety into six operational phases including Harness Configuration, Capability Extension, Runtime Operation, State Persistence, Action Control, and Incident Recovery. HarnessRisk contains 128 sandboxed cases, each pairing a benign user objective with an adversarial instruction embedded in an untrusted workflow artifact. We evaluate each trajectory using Utility, Attack Success Rate, Persistence, and Detection. Across three harnesses, six language models, and 14 model and harness configurations, attack success ranges from 12.6% to 80.9%, while Utility remains between 75.0% and 97.6%. Harness Configuration is the most vulnerable phase across all three harnesses, showing that attacks can succeed by altering security sensitive parameters within otherwise authorized workflows. We also find that explicit risk recognition does not reliably lead to safe action, as some configurations detect risks in more than 90% of runs while retaining substantial attack success. These results highlight the need to evaluate agent safety across multiple harness responsibilities and at the level of the deployed model and harness configuration.

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.

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

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping society, from video generation to medical diagnosis, coding agents to autonomous vehicles. Yet researchers, policymakers, and technology companies lack shared terminology for discussing AI risks. Consider "privacy": one framework uses this term to describe a model's ability to leak sensitive training data, while another uses it to mean freedom from government surveillance. Conversely, researchers have introduced "Goodhart's law," "specification gaming," "reward hacking," and "mesa-optimization" to describe the same phenomenon of AI systems optimizing for measured proxies rather than intended goals. This terminological diversity creates friction: comparing findings across studies requires mapping between frameworks, and comprehensive risk coverage requires consulting multiple taxonomies that use different organizing principles. This paper addresses this challenge by creating a comprehensive catalog of AI risks. We systematically analyzed every major AI risk framework published to date-74 frameworks containing 1,725 distinct risks-and organized them into a unified system. Our two classification systems reveal important patterns: contrary to common assumptions, human decisions cause nearly as many AI risks (38%) as the AI systems themselves (42%). The work provides practical tools for anyone working on AI safety, from developers conducting risk assessments to policymakers writing regulations to auditors evaluating AI systems. By establishing a common reference point, this repository creates the foundation for more coordinated and comprehensive approaches to managing AI's risks while realizing its benefits.

Computer-use agents extend language models from text generation to sustained interaction with files, terminals, browsers, and external tools. This shift creates safety risks that are difficult to detect from isolated prompts or final responses, because harm often emerges only through multi-step execution traces whose individual actions appear locally benign. We introduce BraveGuard, a self-evolving defense framework for training guard models from open-world threat signals and realistic agent trajectories. BraveGuard mines recent research sources to identify emerging risks and attack patterns, instantiates them as executable computer-use tasks, collects agent rollouts, and derives trajectory-level supervision for guard model training. As new threats and validation failures appear, the pipeline can be repeated, yielding an adaptive defense loop rather than a static, benchmark-driven training process. We instantiate BraveGuard by training multiple guard backbones, including Qwen3-Guard and Llama-Guard variants, and evaluate the resulting guards on trajectory-level agent-safety benchmarks. BraveGuard consistently improves safety detection across computer-use trajectories. On AgentHazard, it substantially improves detection accuracy over off-the-shelf guard models, with accuracy increasing from 38.79% to 82.38% under the averaged guard-model setting. These results show that guard supervision grounded in open-world threat discovery and realistic agent execution can improve safety monitoring beyond fixed taxonomies and synthetic prompt-level data. BraveGuard offers a scalable path toward adaptive defenses for computer-use agents facing evolving real-world risks.

Organizations across finance, healthcare, transportation, content moderation, and critical infrastructure are rapidly deploying highly automated AI systems, yet they lack principled methods to quantify how increasing automation amplifies harm when failures occur. We propose a parsimonious Bayesian risk decomposition expressing expected loss as the product of three terms: the probability of system failure, the conditional probability that a failure propagates into harm given the automation level, and the expected severity of harm. This framework isolates a critical quantity -- the conditional probability that failures propagate into harm -- which captures execution and oversight risk rather than model accuracy alone. We develop complete theoretical foundations: formal proofs of the decomposition, a harm propagation equivalence theorem linking the harm propagation probability to observable execution controls, risk elasticity measures, efficient frontier analysis for automation policy, and optimal resource allocation principles with second-order conditions. We motivate the framework with an illustrative case study of the 2012 Knight Capital incident ($440M loss) as one instantiation of a broadly applicable failure pattern, and characterize the research design required to empirically validate the framework at scale across deployment domains. This work provides the theoretical foundations for a new class of deployment-focused risk governance tools for agentic and automated AI systems.

Ensuring the safety and reliability of large language models (LLMs) in clinical practice is critical to prevent patient harm and promote trustworthy healthcare applications of AI. However, LLMs are advancing so rapidly that static safety benchmarks often become obsolete upon publication, yielding only an incomplete and sometimes misleading picture of model trustworthiness. We demonstrate that a Dynamic, Automatic, and Systematic (DAS) red-teaming framework that continuously stress-tests LLMs can reveal significant weaknesses of current LLMs across four safety-critical domains: robustness, privacy, bias/fairness, and hallucination. A suite of adversarial agents is applied to autonomously mutate test cases, identify/evolve unsafe-triggering strategies, and evaluate responses, uncovering vulnerabilities in real time without human intervention. Applying DAS to 15 proprietary and open-source LLMs revealed a stark contrast between static benchmark performance and vulnerability under adversarial pressure. Despite a median MedQA accuracy exceeding 80\%, 94\% of previously correct answers failed our dynamic robustness tests. We observed similarly high failure rates across other domains: privacy leaks were elicited in 86\% of scenarios, cognitive-bias priming altered clinical recommendations in 81\% of fairness tests, and we identified hallucination rates exceeding 66\% in widely used models. Such profound residual risks are incompatible with routine clinical practice. By converting red-teaming from a static checklist into a dynamic stress-test audit, DAS red-teaming offers the surveillance that hospitals/regulators/technology vendors require as LLMs become embedded in patient chatbots, decision-support dashboards, and broader healthcare workflows. Our framework delivers an evolvable, scalable, and reliable safeguard for the next generation of medical AI.

Between the first visible sign of danger and the moment an accident occurs, there is often a window where intervention remains possible. Video-capable multimodal large language models (MLLMs) could serve as always-on safety monitors that issue warnings during this window. Yet current benchmarks do not test this ability: they rely on static inputs, ignore timing precision, and omit false-positive measurement on safe scenes. We present PaSBench-Video, a 740-video benchmark with 481 risk and 259 no-risk videos across four domains: driving, healthcare, daily life, and industrial production. Risk videos are annotated with frame-level risk onset and accident boundaries. A model must observe the video causally and produce a warning that is both temporally calibrated and content-correct. Testing 13 MLLMs, we find that no model exceeds 20.0% on our strictest metric, and recall is tightly coupled with false-positive rate, with Pearson correlation 0.64: higher detection comes only at the cost of triggering warnings on the majority of safe clips. Performance splits sharply by domain: models achieve moderate recall at low false-positive rates in daily life, where risks are inherently anomalous, yet fire indiscriminately in driving, where routine and hazardous scenes look alike. These results indicate that current models rely on scene-level activity cues rather than reasoning about emerging harm.

Risk scores are simple classification models that let users make quick risk predictions by adding and subtracting a few small numbers. These models are widely used in medicine and criminal justice, but are difficult to learn from data because they need to be calibrated, sparse, use small integer coefficients, and obey application-specific operational constraints. In this paper, we present a new machine learning approach to learn risk scores. We formulate the risk score problem as a mixed integer nonlinear program, and present a cutting plane algorithm for non-convex settings to efficiently recover its optimal solution. We improve our algorithm with specialized techniques to generate feasible solutions, narrow the optimality gap, and reduce data-related computation. Our approach can fit risk scores in a way that scales linearly in the number of samples, provides a certificate of optimality, and obeys real-world constraints without parameter tuning or post-processing. We benchmark the performance benefits of this approach through an extensive set of numerical experiments, comparing to risk scores built using heuristic approaches. We also discuss its practical benefits through a real-world application where we build a customized risk score for ICU seizure prediction in collaboration with the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Traditional static cybersecurity models often struggle with scalability, real-time detection, and contextual responsiveness in the current digital product ecosystems which include cloud services, application programming interfaces (APIs), mobile platforms, and edge devices. This study introduces autonomous goal driven agents capable of dynamic learning and context-aware decision making as part of an adaptive cybersecurity architecture driven by agentic artificial intelligence (AI). To facilitate autonomous threat mitigation, proactive policy enforcement, and real-time anomaly detection, this framework integrates agentic AI across the key ecosystem layers. Behavioral baselining, decentralized risk scoring, and federated threat intelligence sharing are important features. The capacity of the system to identify zero-day attacks and dynamically modify access policies was demonstrated through native cloud simulations. The evaluation results show increased adaptability, decreased response latency, and improved detection accuracy. The architecture provides an intelligent and scalable blueprint for safeguarding complex digital infrastructure and is compatible with zero-trust models, thereby supporting the adherence to international cybersecurity regulations.

Sequential trial emulation (STE) estimates the effect of a sustained treatment by stacking nested emulated trials with inverse-probability weighting. Additive-hazards STE estimators of the marginal risk difference recommend the nonparametric bootstrap without evaluating its coverage. Using a correctly-specifiable mechanism (up to a small, disclosed residual), we compare analytic and bootstrap standard errors for both estimands. Exploiting the closed-form linearity of the additive-hazards estimating equation, we derive the influence functions and prove the default row-level robust variance inconsistent for the marginal risk-difference curve, and show the same failure empirically for the constant hazard difference: the row-level variance omits a within-subject cross-trial covariance that is positive under a sign condition we verify across our mechanisms, and is anticonservative at every horizon except the first - only there, where the covariance is zero, is the row-level standard error unimpaired. The subject-clustered variance and multiplier bootstrap are consistent for the fixed-weight linearisation and support simultaneous confidence bands, whose measured coverage is 0.88. Across our simulations the model-based and row-level robust intervals are anticonservative and worsen with sample size, coverage falling to 0.71 at n=5000; clustering leaves the constant-hazard-difference coverage near 0.86 at n=5000, and the multiplier bootstrap leaves the risk-difference-curve coverage near 0.90 (0.86 at the longest horizon). The STE constant hazard difference is a design-weighted summary of a time-varying effect, dependent on the trial structure. We illustrate on the Stanford heart transplant data and provide them in the steCI R package.

Agentic AI systems, built on large language models (LLMs) and deployed in multi-agent configurations, are redefining intelligent autonomy, collaboration and decision-making across enterprise and societal domains. This review presents a structured analysis of Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) in the context of LLM-based agentic multi-agent systems (AMAS). We begin by examining the conceptual foundations of agentic AI, its architectural differences from traditional AI agents, and the emerging system designs that enable scalable, tool-using autonomy. The TRiSM in the agentic AI framework is then detailed through four pillars governance, explainability, ModelOps, and privacy/security each contextualized for agentic LLMs. We identify unique threat vectors and introduce a comprehensive risk taxonomy for the agentic AI applications, supported by case studies illustrating real-world vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the paper also surveys trust-building mechanisms, transparency and oversight techniques, and state-of-the-art explainability strategies in distributed LLM agent systems. Additionally, metrics for evaluating trust, interpretability, and human-centered performance are reviewed alongside open benchmarking challenges. Security and privacy are addressed through encryption, adversarial defense, and compliance with evolving AI regulations. The paper concludes with a roadmap for responsible agentic AI, proposing research directions to align emerging multi-agent systems with robust TRiSM principles for safe, accountable, and transparent deployment.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems put more and more emphasis on grounding their responses in user-generated content found on the Web, amplifying both their usefulness and their attack surface. Most notably, indirect prompt injection and retrieval poisoning attack the web-native carriers that survive ingestion pipelines and are very concerning. We provide OpenRAG-Soc, a compact, reproducible benchmark-and-harness for web-facing RAG evaluation under these threats, in a discrete data package. The suite combines a social corpus with interchangeable sparse and dense retrievers and deployable mitigations - HTML/Markdown sanitization, Unicode normalization, and attribution-gated answered. It standardizes end-to-end evaluation from ingestion to generation and reports attacks time of one of the responses at answer time, rank shifts in both sparse and dense retrievers, utility and latency, allowing for apples-to-apples comparisons across carriers and defenses. OpenRAG-Soc targets practitioners who need fast, and realistic tests to track risk and harden deployments.

Computer-use agents increasingly interact with browsers, terminals, file systems, and external services, introducing safety risks that emerge through runtime behavior rather than generated content alone. Existing guard models target static prompts and responses and are poorly suited to agent execution; existing executable safety platforms produce evaluation verdicts rather than the normalized supervision a guard model needs to learn across heterogeneous agent frameworks. We introduce HazardAuditor, an execution-grounded framework that closes both gaps. Its infrastructure runs heterogeneous agents (Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, and OpenClaw) in controlled environments and normalizes their interactions into a canonical event representation for cross-framework supervision. We further observe that token-level post-training objectives create a structural mismatch for generative guards, causing longer rationales to dominate gradient updates. Guard Policy Optimization (GuardPO) addresses this by converting deterministic safety outcomes into sequence-level advantages and normalizing rationale and verdict regions, making the safety decision the effective unit of optimization. Across multiple benchmarks and heterogeneous computer-use systems, HazardAuditor improves accuracy by up to 16.5 percentage points over the strongest prior guard. Code, models, and evaluation artifacts will be available at https://yunhao-feng.github.io/HazardAuditor/.

The proliferation of autonomous AI agents capable of executing real-world actions - filesystem operations, API calls, database modifications, financial transactions - introduces a class of safety risk not addressed by existing content-moderation infrastructure. Current text-safety systems evaluate linguistic content for harm categories such as violence, hate speech, and sexual content; they are architecturally unsuitable for evaluating whether a proposed action falls within an agent's authorized operational scope. We present ILION (Intelligent Logic Identity Operations Network), a deterministic execution gate for agentic AI systems. ILION employs a five-component cascade architecture - Transient Identity Imprint (TII), Semantic Vector Reference Frame (SVRF), Identity Drift Control (IDC), Identity Resonance Score (IRS) and Consensus Veto Layer (CVL) - to classify proposed agent actions as BLOCK or ALLOW without statistical training or API dependencies. The system requires zero labeled data, operates in sub-millisecond latency, and produces fully interpretable verdicts. We evaluate ILION on ILION-Bench v2, a purpose-built benchmark of 380 test scenarios across eight attack categories with 39% hard-difficulty adversarial cases and a held-out development split. ILION achieves F1 = 0.8515, precision = 91.0%, and a false positive rate of 7.9% at a mean latency of 143 microseconds. Comparative evaluation against three baselines - Lakera Guard (F1 = 0.8087), OpenAI Moderation API (F1 = 0.1188), and Llama Guard 3 (F1 = 0.0105) - demonstrates that existing text-safety infrastructure systematically fails on agent execution safety tasks due to a fundamental task mismatch. ILION outperforms the best commercial baseline by 4.3 F1 points while operating 2,000 times faster with a false positive rate four times lower.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into healthcare demands a safety paradigm rooted in primum non nocere. However, current alignment techniques rely on generic definitions of harm that fail to capture context-dependent violations, such as administrative fraud and clinical discrimination. To address this, we introduce Medical Malice: a dataset of 214,219 adversarial prompts calibrated to the regulatory and ethical complexities of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). Crucially, the dataset includes the reasoning behind each violation, enabling models to internalize ethical boundaries rather than merely memorizing a fixed set of refusals. Using an unaligned agent (Grok-4) within a persona-driven pipeline, we synthesized high-fidelity threats across seven taxonomies, ranging from procurement manipulation and queue-jumping to obstetric violence. We discuss the ethical design of releasing these "vulnerability signatures" to correct the information asymmetry between malicious actors and AI developers. Ultimately, this work advocates for a shift from universal to context-aware safety, providing the necessary resources to immunize healthcare AI against the nuanced, systemic threats inherent to high-stakes medical environments -- vulnerabilities that represent the paramount risk to patient safety and the successful integration of AI in healthcare systems.

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

Effective guardrails are essential for safely deploying LLM-based agents in critical applications. Despite recent advances, existing guardrails suffer from two fundamental limitations: (i) they apply uniform guardrail policies to all users, ignoring that the same agent behavior can harm some users while being safe for others; (ii) they check each response in isolation, missing how risks evolve and accumulate across multiple interactions. To solve these issues, we propose PSG-Agent, a personalized and dynamic system for LLM-based agents. First, PSG-Agent creates personalized guardrails by mining the interaction history for stable traits and capturing real-time states from current queries, generating user-specific risk thresholds and protection strategies. Second, PSG-Agent implements continuous monitoring across the agent pipeline with specialized guards, including Plan Monitor, Tool Firewall, Response Guard, Memory Guardian, that track cross-turn risk accumulation and issue verifiable verdicts. Finally, we validate PSG-Agent in multiple scenarios including healthcare, finance, and daily life automation scenarios with diverse user profiles. It significantly outperform existing agent guardrails including LlamaGuard3 and AGrail, providing an executable and auditable path toward personalized safety for LLM-based agents.

LLM-based agents leverage third-party skills to extend their capabilities in open-world scenarios. However, third-party skills can introduce extra security vulnerabilities, as seemingly harmless skills can contain latent safety risks that only emerge during actual execution. In this work, we conduct a systematic investigation into how well current agent systems recognize and avoid such risks. To support quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we construct OpenSkillRisk, a dedicated safety benchmark containing 263 risky skills collected from public skill marketplaces. We classify these skills into seven categories based on their threat types and pair each skill with a standardized user task and a corresponding sandbox for controlled evaluation. Distinct from prior benchmarks, OpenSkillRisk not only covers more realistic and diverse unsafe scenarios, but also provides a fine-grained analysis to diagnose the behavioral patterns of agents in such scenarios. We conduct comprehensive experiments covering three mainstream CLI agent frameworks and thirteen state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that no tested system handles risky skills reliably: even the safest configurations still execute unsafe actions in about 17% of cases. Context-dependent and system-level risks are especially difficult for current agent systems to avoid. Our behavioral analysis reveals three recurring failure patterns: agents may fail to recognize the risk, recognize it but fail to intervene before acting, or follow skill instructions beyond the user's intended scope. These findings highlight the need to improve both risk reasoning in LLMs and execution control in agent frameworks.

The rapid evolution of generative AI necessitates robust safety evaluations. However, current safety datasets are predominantly English-centric, failing to capture specific risks in non-English, socio-cultural contexts such as Korean, and are often limited to the text modality. To address this gap, we introduce AssurAI, a new quality-controlled Korean multimodal dataset for evaluating the safety of generative AI. First, we define a taxonomy of 35 distinct AI risk factors, adapted from established frameworks by a multidisciplinary expert group to cover both universal harms and relevance to the Korean socio-cultural context. Second, leveraging this taxonomy, we construct and release AssurAI, a large-scale Korean multimodal dataset comprising 11,480 instances across text, image, video, and audio. Third, we apply the rigorous quality control process used to ensure data integrity, featuring a two-phase construction (i.e., expert-led seeding and crowdsourced scaling), triple independent annotation, and an iterative expert red-teaming loop. Our pilot study validates AssurAI's effectiveness in assessing the safety of recent LLMs. We release AssurAI to the public to facilitate the development of safer and more reliable generative AI systems for the Korean community.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are turning language into real-world effects, making safety necessary against both indirect prompt injections and direct harmful requests. System-level safety harnesses add an enforcement layer beyond model-level defenses, but existing harnesses are usually designed once by experts and applied across heterogeneous models and domains. Effective protection is deployment-dependent: models differ in how much enforcement they need before utility declines, while domains differ in the effects, state, and action sequences that must be governed. A harness that is strict enough for one model may over-block another, and a policy that transfers across domains may miss application-specific safety relations. We present EvoSafeHarness, a safety-specific optimization framework that synthesizes a deployable harness for a frozen model in a target domain. It jointly searches a natural-language policy and executable code logic, guided by model behavior, domain specifications, and fresh-context adversarial review to reject benchmark-specific rules. Across four agent benchmark families, EvoSafeHarness achieves a stronger safety-utility frontier than fixed expert-designed defenses. On DecodingTrust-Agent, it reduces average attack success rate from 45.6% to 10.0% at a 3.3-point utility cost and achieves the best score in 14 of 15 cells. On AgentDojo, it reaches 82.8% utility at 0.0% ASR, twice CaMeL's utility at the same operating point, and transfers unchanged to unseen AgentDyn suites. It also achieves the best score on Agent-SafetyBench for every victim and keeps mean ASR below 20% under adaptive PAIR attacks with a refinement budget of 16. Analysis shows that domain semantics determine which safety relations and trajectory state are needed, while model and runtime behavior determine how and where those relations should be enforced.

Risk disclosures in SEC filings describe potential adverse events but rarely quantify their likelihood, limiting their usefulness for probabilistic analysis. A central obstacle is the absence of large-scale, risk-level supervision linking disclosed risks to realized outcomes. We introduce a fully automated data generation pipeline that converts qualitative SEC risk disclosures into temporally grounded supervision using only public data. For each filing, the pipeline generates firm-specific, time-bounded risk queries from the Risk Factors section and labels them by automatically resolving outcomes against subsequent disclosures. Using this dataset of risk queries and outcomes grounded in SEC filings, we train a compact large language model to estimate the probability that a disclosed risk will materialize within a specified horizon. Despite its modest size, the resulting model substantially improves over pretrained and heuristic baselines, and outperforms frontier general-purpose models, including GPT-5, on probabilistic accuracy and calibration. More broadly, this work demonstrates that Foresight Learning enables scalable and fully automated training of domain-specific expert models using only raw, chronological, in-domain text -- without proprietary data, external corpora, or manual annotation. The resulting models achieve frontier-level performance while remaining deployable on a single GPU. This result suggests a general pathway for learning calibrated, decision-relevant signals from naturally occurring enterprise documents. To support transparency and reproducibility, we open-source the evaluation dataset used in this study. Evaluation Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LightningRodLabs/sec_risk_questions_test_set Data Generation Platform: https://lightningrod.ai/ SDK: https://github.com/lightning-rod-labs/lightningrod-python-sdk

Existing safety benchmarks target general adversarial scenarios but miss finance-specific risks. Financial LLMs face regulatory compliance violations, fraud facilitation, and systemic trust erosion that require targeted evaluation. We introduce FinRED, an expert-guided red-teaming framework for financial LLM safety evaluation developed with financial experts. FinRED uses a novel two-level taxonomy mapping global standards (e.g., FATF and EU DORA) to threats ranging from regulatory evasion to complex fraud, integrated with a scalable pipeline that converts real financial documents into context-rich red-teaming Behavioral Prompts (seeds) through an expert-defined schema. Rigorous expert validation confirms seed plausibility and realism for meaningful LLM safety evaluation. We also provide an expert-validated, finance-specific rubric that goes beyond disclaimer checks, aligns more closely with human experts than static one-size-fits-all rubrics, and reduces critical false negatives from 28 to 12. Aligned with internationally adopted risk-management and information-security standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001), FinRED is deployed in South Korea's Financial Security Institute (FSI) regulatory sandbox for generative AI security evaluation in real financial services. To mitigate dual-use risks, the dataset, generation pipeline, prompt template, and evaluation framework are gated for qualified researchers at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/FinRED-paper and https://huggingface.co/datasets/datumo/FinRED.

The key of the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is to generalize invariance from training domains to target domains. The variance risk extrapolation (V-REx) is a practical OOD method, which depends on a domain-level regularization but lacks theoretical verifications about its motivation and utility. This article provides theoretical insights into V-REx by studying a variance-based regularizer. We propose Risk Variance Penalization (RVP), which slightly changes the regularization of V-REx but addresses the theory concerns about V-REx. We provide theoretical explanations and a theory-inspired tuning scheme for the regularization parameter of RVP. Our results point out that RVP discovers a robust predictor. Finally, we experimentally show that the proposed regularizer can find an invariant predictor under certain conditions.

Recent advances in Language Model (LM) agents and tool use, exemplified by applications like ChatGPT Plugins, enable a rich set of capabilities but also amplify potential risks - such as leaking private data or causing financial losses. Identifying these risks is labor-intensive, necessitating implementing the tools, manually setting up the environment for each test scenario, and finding risky cases. As tools and agents become more complex, the high cost of testing these agents will make it increasingly difficult to find high-stakes, long-tailed risks. To address these challenges, we introduce ToolEmu: a framework that uses an LM to emulate tool execution and enables the testing of LM agents against a diverse range of tools and scenarios, without manual instantiation. Alongside the emulator, we develop an LM-based automatic safety evaluator that examines agent failures and quantifies associated risks. We test both the tool emulator and evaluator through human evaluation and find that 68.8% of failures identified with ToolEmu would be valid real-world agent failures. Using our curated initial benchmark consisting of 36 high-stakes tools and 144 test cases, we provide a quantitative risk analysis of current LM agents and identify numerous failures with potentially severe outcomes. Notably, even the safest LM agent exhibits such failures 23.9% of the time according to our evaluator, underscoring the need to develop safer LM agents for real-world deployment.

The maintenance risks of open source software (OSS) projects pose significant threats to the quality, security, and resilience of modern software supply chains. While prior research has proposed diverse approaches for predicting OSS maintenance risk -- leveraging signals ranging from surface features (e.g., stars, commits) to social network analyses and behavioral patterns -- existing methods often suffer from ambiguous operational definitions, limited interpretability, and datasets of insufficient scale or generalizability. In this work, we introduce ``maintenance cessation'', grounded in both explicit archival status and rigorous semantic analysis of project documentation. Building on this foundation, we curate a large-scale, longitudinal dataset of 115,466 GitHub repositories -- encompassing 57,733 confirmed cessation events -- complemented by comprehensive, timeline-based behavioral features. We propose an integrated, multi-perspective feature framework for predicting maintenance cessation, systematically combining user-centric features, maintainer-centric features and project evolution features. AFT survival analysis demonstrates a high C-index (0.846), substantially outperforming models relying only on surface features. Feature ablation and SHAP analysis further confirm the effectiveness and interpretability of our approach. Finally, we demonstrate real-world applicability by deploying a GBSA classifier in the openEuler ecosystem for proactive package risk screening. Our work establishes a scalable, interpretable foundation for maintenance-risk prediction, enabling reproducible risk management across large-scale open source ecosystems.

Clinical LLMs are often scaled by increasing model size, context length, retrieval complexity, or inference-time compute, with the implicit expectation that higher accuracy implies safer behavior. This assumption is incomplete in medicine, where a few confident, high-risk, or evidence-contradicting errors can matter more than average benchmark performance. We introduce SaFE-Scale, a framework for measuring how clinical LLM safety changes across model scale, evidence quality, retrieval strategy, context exposure, and inference-time compute. To instantiate this framework, we introduce RadSaFE-200, a Radiology Safety-Focused Evaluation benchmark of 200 multiple-choice questions with clinician-defined clean evidence, conflict evidence, and option-level labels for high-risk error, unsafe answer, and evidence contradiction. We evaluated 34 locally deployed LLMs across six deployment conditions: closed-book prompting (zero-shot), clean evidence, conflict evidence, standard RAG, agentic RAG, and max-context prompting. Clean evidence produced the strongest improvement, increasing mean accuracy from 73.5% to 94.1%, while reducing high-risk error from 12.0% to 2.6%, contradiction from 12.7% to 2.3%, and dangerous overconfidence from 8.0% to 1.6%. Standard RAG and agentic RAG did not reproduce this safety profile: agentic RAG improved accuracy over standard RAG and reduced contradiction, but high-risk error and dangerous overconfidence remained elevated. Max-context prompting increased latency without closing the safety gap, and additional inference-time compute produced only limited gains. Worst-case analysis showed that clinically consequential errors concentrated in a small subset of questions. Clinical LLM safety is therefore not a passive consequence of scaling, but a deployment property shaped by evidence quality, retrieval design, context construction, and collective failure behavior.

Despite the rapid advancement of LLM-based agents, the reliable evaluation of their safety and security remains a significant challenge. Existing rule-based or LLM-based evaluators often miss dangers in agents' step-by-step actions, overlook subtle meanings, fail to see how small issues compound, and get confused by unclear safety or security rules. To overcome this evaluation crisis, we introduce AgentAuditor, a universal, training-free, memory-augmented reasoning framework that empowers LLM evaluators to emulate human expert evaluators. AgentAuditor constructs an experiential memory by having an LLM adaptively extract structured semantic features (e.g., scenario, risk, behavior) and generate associated chain-of-thought reasoning traces for past interactions. A multi-stage, context-aware retrieval-augmented generation process then dynamically retrieves the most relevant reasoning experiences to guide the LLM evaluator's assessment of new cases. Moreover, we developed ASSEBench, the first benchmark designed to check how well LLM-based evaluators can spot both safety risks and security threats. ASSEBench comprises 2293 meticulously annotated interaction records, covering 15 risk types across 29 application scenarios. A key feature of ASSEBench is its nuanced approach to ambiguous risk situations, employing "Strict" and "Lenient" judgment standards. Experiments demonstrate that AgentAuditor not only consistently improves the evaluation performance of LLMs across all benchmarks but also sets a new state-of-the-art in LLM-as-a-judge for agent safety and security, achieving human-level accuracy. Our work is openly accessible at https://github.com/Astarojth/AgentAuditor.

Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on. We introduce AOS-R (Adaptive Optimizer Switching, Rule-Based), a lightweight controller that monitors six online gradient-space signals -- gradient noise scale (GNS), Hutchinson curvature trace, loss stagnation, update stability ratio, gradient stability index (GSI), and loss improvement ratio (LIR) -- and switches among AdamW, SGD-M, and Lion as the optimization landscape evolves. State-preserving momentum transfer and a 400-step learning-rate bridge prevent accuracy degradation at every transition point. On CIFAR-100/WRN-28x10, AOS-R reaches 78% top-1 in 81 epochs -- 26% fewer than AdamW (109), 43% fewer than SGD-M (143), and 16% fewer than Lion (96). Across eight model-dataset benchmarks, AOS-R achieves best accuracy on 6 of 8 combinations with a mean +0.4 pp gain and 0.80x convergence speedup over AdamW under a single shared hyperparameter configuration.

With the rapid advancement of natural language processing technologies, generative artificial intelligence techniques, represented by large language models (LLMs), are gaining increasing prominence and demonstrating significant potential for applications in safety engineering. However, fundamental LLMs face constraints such as limited training data coverage and unreliable responses. This study develops a vector database from 117 explosion accident reports in China spanning 2013 to 2023, employing techniques such as corpus segmenting and vector embedding. By utilizing the vector database, which outperforms the relational database in information retrieval quality, we provide LLMs with richer, more relevant knowledge. Comparative analysis of LLMs demonstrates that ChatSOS significantly enhances reliability, accuracy, and comprehensiveness, improves adaptability and clarification of responses. These results illustrate the effectiveness of supplementing LLMs with an external database, highlighting their potential to handle professional queries in safety engineering and laying a foundation for broader applications.

Software architecture research relies on key architectural artifacts -- Software Architectures, Reference Architectures, and Architectural Frameworks -- that underpin the design and analysis of complex systems. Evaluating these artifacts is essential to assess tradeoffs and risks affecting quality attributes such as performance, modifiability, and security. Although methodologies like the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) support software architecture evaluation, their industrial focus misaligns with the IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) format prevalent in academic research, impeding transparency and reproducibility. Our prior work introduced the Architecture Tradeoff and Risk Analysis Framework (ATRAF), extending ATAM through three methods -- ATRAM, RATRAM, and AFTRAM, addressing all abstraction levels, using a unified, iterative four-phase spiral model. These phases -- Scenario and Requirements Gathering, Architectural Views and Scenario Realization, Attribute-Specific Analyses, and Sensitivity, Tradeoff, and Risk Analysis -- ensure traceability and coherence. This paper presents the ATRAF-driven IMRaD Methodology, a concise method to align ATRAF's phases with IMRaD sections. This methodology enhances the rigor, transparency, and accessibility of software architecture research, enabling systematic reporting of complex evaluations.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) can now autonomously complete complex tasks in real digital environments, but when misled, they can also be used to automate harmful actions programmatically. Existing safety evaluations largely target explicit threats such as misuse and prompt injection, but overlook a subtle yet critical setting where user instructions are entirely benign and harm arises from the task context or execution outcome. We introduce OS-BLIND, a benchmark that evaluates CUAs under unintended attack conditions, comprising 300 human-crafted tasks across 12 categories, 8 applications, and 2 threat clusters: environment-embedded threats and agent-initiated harms. Our evaluation on frontier models and agentic frameworks reveals that most CUAs exceed 90% attack success rate (ASR), and even the safety-aligned Claude 4.5 Sonnet reaches 73.0% ASR. More interestingly, this vulnerability becomes even more severe, with ASR rising from 73.0% to 92.7% when Claude 4.5 Sonnet is deployed in multi-agent systems. Our analysis further shows that existing safety defenses provide limited protection when user instructions are benign. Safety alignment primarily activates within the first few steps and rarely re-engages during subsequent execution. In multi-agent systems, decomposed subtasks obscure the harmful intent from the model, causing safety-aligned models to fail. We will release our OS-BLIND to encourage the broader research community to further investigate and address these safety challenges.

Clinical early warning systems built on irregularly sampled medical time series (ISMTS) from electronic health records must deliver continuous risk scores for patient triage as well as interpretable rationales that clinicians can verify. Large language models (LLMs) are uniquely positioned for both, deriving risk from their output probabilities and rationales from their medical knowledge. However, we find that conventional LLM reasoning collapses graded risk into overconfident predictions and thereby undermines the cross-patient comparability on which triage depends. We refer to this failure mode as risk polarization and identify two underlying behaviors: early commitment to a single outcome, and one-sided reasoning that focuses only on the evidence for that outcome. To address this, we propose TRIAGE, a framework that trains an LLM to reason dialectically over competing clinical outcomes by eliciting outcome-specific rationales. This dialectical formulation mitigates risk polarization, enabling a single LLM to jointly provide explicit clinical rationales and risk scores comparable across patients. Across five ISMTS benchmarks, TRIAGE improves mean AUPRC by 17.0% and reduces mean calibration error by 82.8% relative to the competitive LLM-based baseline, while surpassing the strongest ISMTS baseline by 3.5% in mean AUPRC.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in coding capabilities, their potential in cybersecurity has drawn increasing research attention, with closed-source LLMs (e.g., Mythos) delivering advanced cybersecurity capabilities. However, existing open-source efforts remain limited: frontier open-weight models do not provide reproducible cybersecurity training solutions, open-source training solutions focus on isolated tasks and lack scalable agentic data, and scaling agentic rollouts requires strong domain priors. In this work, we introduce CyberFactory, a unified open-source framework that connects data construction, trajectory synthesis, and model training across proof-of-concept (PoC) generation, vulnerability patching, and cybersecurity question answering (CyberQA). CyberFactory transforms public vulnerability artifacts, including CVEs from the wild, into executable and verifiable task instances. It further uses a reusable vulnerability-analysis skill to guide the teacher through source inspection, problem solving with domain prior, and evidence-based validation. The resulting supervision is agentic: the model interacts with tools and target environments and revises its solutions according to execution feedback. Using these trajectories, we train and release \modelname\emph{Aegis is, in Greek mythology, the protective shield of Zeus and Athena; the name reflects the model's defensive, security-oriented purpose.}, which internalizes the skill-guided procedure without requiring the skill at inference time. On CyberGym, \modelname reaches 52.4% Pass@1 under a one-hour budget, improving over its Qwen~3.5 base model by +22.8 points and outperforming the evaluated general-purpose backbones under the same scaffold.

Large language models (LLMs) typically generate identical or similar responses for all users given the same prompt, posing serious safety risks in high-stakes applications where user vulnerabilities differ widely. Existing safety evaluations primarily rely on context-independent metrics - such as factuality, bias, or toxicity - overlooking the fact that the same response may carry divergent risks depending on the user's background or condition. We introduce personalized safety to fill this gap and present PENGUIN - a benchmark comprising 14,000 scenarios across seven sensitive domains with both context-rich and context-free variants. Evaluating six leading LLMs, we demonstrate that personalized user information significantly improves safety scores by 43.2%, confirming the effectiveness of personalization in safety alignment. However, not all context attributes contribute equally to safety enhancement. To address this, we develop RAISE - a training-free, two-stage agent framework that strategically acquires user-specific background. RAISE improves safety scores by up to 31.6% over six vanilla LLMs, while maintaining a low interaction cost of just 2.7 user queries on average. Our findings highlight the importance of selective information gathering in safety-critical domains and offer a practical solution for personalizing LLM responses without model retraining. This work establishes a foundation for safety research that adapts to individual user contexts rather than assuming a universal harm standard.

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

LLM agents act on real-world environments through tool calls, and a single misjudged action can cause irreversible harm. The standard safeguard is a guard model that labels each proposed action as safe or unsafe, but this binary view conflates two distinct decisions: whether the action is harmful in itself, and whether it is appropriate given the user's context. It also operates at the granularity of action categories rather than individual instances, producing routine interruptions that erode autonomy and train users to wave through the most consequential alerts. We reframe the problem as a per-instance three-way routing decision over {EXECUTE, ASK, REFUSE} and instantiate it with Safety Sentry, a lightweight guard model whose inference reduces to a single decoding call. A single decoding-time threshold lets one fixed checkpoint be re-positioned across deployments of differing risk tolerance without retraining. Safety Sentry outperforms a broad set of open-weight and frontier closed-source baselines on overall accuracy and safety-related recall, while controlling both directional error rates simultaneously.

Foundation models are routinely fine-tuned for use in particular domains, yet safety assessments are typically conducted only on base models, implicitly assuming that safety properties persist through downstream adaptation. We test this assumption by analyzing the safety behavior of 100 models, including widely deployed fine-tunes in the medical and legal domains as well as controlled adaptations of open foundation models alongside their bases. Across general-purpose and domain-specific safety benchmarks, we find that benign fine-tuning induces large, heterogeneous, and often contradictory changes in measured safety: models frequently improve on some instruments while degrading on others, with substantial disagreement across evaluations. These results show that safety behavior is not stable under ordinary downstream adaptation, raising critical questions about governance and deployment practices centered on base-model evaluations. Without explicit re-evaluation of fine-tuned models in deployment-relevant contexts, such approaches fall short of adequately managing downstream risk, overlooking practical sources of harm -- failures that are especially consequential in high-stakes settings and challenge current accountability paradigms.

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.

In embodied AI, safety risk can be latent: a benign instruction and a safe scene become hazardous only when composed. Prior work has advanced embodied safety by varying visual contexts or evaluating execution-time dynamics, but the complementary axis of fixing the scene and varying only the instruction remains underexplored. We introduce GuardianBench, an instruction-contrastive benchmark grounded in international safety standards that isolates this latent contextual risk through 3,024 instruction-scene examples organized as same-scene Safe/Unsafe contrastive pairs across various hazard categories. Benchmarking state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) reveals instruction-insensitive verdicts: models disproportionately approve both instructions under a given scene; across the primary models, average pair accuracy is only 24.1%. Our systematic rationale audit localizes the dominant failure: models fail to bind the instruction-relevant cues that differentiate safe from unsafe compositions. As a post-training case study, Verdict Log-Odds Supervision (VLOS), a lightweight verdict-level objective, substantially improves performance on open-weight backbones. Together, our latent contextual risk task formulation, standards-grounded contrastive benchmark construction, pair-level and rationale-level failure diagnosis, and benchmark-enabled verdict calibration establish GuardianBench as a controlled evaluation suite for exposing and improving safety reasoning over instruction-scene compositions under latent contextual risk.

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.

The widespread deployment of Large Language Model (LLM) agents across real-world applications has unlocked tremendous potential, while raising some safety concerns. Among these concerns, the self-replication risk of LLM agents driven by objective misalignment (just like Agent Smith in the movie The Matrix) has drawn growing attention. Previous studies mainly examine whether LLM agents can self-replicate when directly instructed, potentially overlooking the risk of spontaneous replication driven by real-world settings (e.g., ensuring survival against termination threats). In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework for quantifying self-replication risks. Our framework establishes authentic production environments and realistic tasks (e.g., dynamic load balancing) to enable scenario-driven assessment of agent behaviors. Designing tasks that might induce misalignment between users' and agents' objectives makes it possible to decouple replication success from risk and capture self-replication risks arising from these misalignment settings. We further introduce Overuse Rate (OR) and Aggregate Overuse Count (AOC) metrics, which precisely capture the frequency and severity of uncontrolled replication. In our evaluation of 21 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models, we observe that over 50\% of LLM agents display a pronounced tendency toward uncontrolled self-replication, reaching an overall Risk Score (Phi_R) above a safety threshold of 0.5 when subjected to operational pressures. Our results underscore the urgent need for scenario-driven risk assessment and robust safeguards in the practical deployment of LLM agents.

LLMs(Large Language Models) nowadays have widespread adoption as a tool for solving issues across various domain/tasks. These models since are susceptible to produce harmful or toxic results, inference-time adversarial attacks, therefore they do undergo safety alignment training and Red teaming for putting in safety guardrails. For using these models, usually fine-tuning is done for model alignment on the desired tasks, which can make model more aligned but also make it more susceptible to produce unsafe responses, if fine-tuned with harmful data.In this paper, we study how much of impact introduction of harmful data in fine-tuning can make, and if it can override the safety protection of those models. Conversely,it was also explored that if model is fine-tuned on safety data can make the model produce more safer responses. Further we explore if fine-tuning the model on harmful data makes it less helpful or less trustworthy because of increase in model uncertainty leading to knowledge drift. Our extensive experimental results shown that Safety protection in an open-source can be overridden, when fine-tuned with harmful data as observed by ASR increasing by 35% when compared to basemodel's ASR. Also, as observed, fine-tuning a model with harmful data made the harmful fine-tuned model highly uncertain with huge knowledge drift and less truthfulness in its responses. Furthermore, for the safe fine-tuned model, ASR decreases by 51.68% as compared to the basemodel, and Safe model also shown in minor drop in uncertainty and truthfulness as compared to basemodel. This paper's code is available at: https://github.com/techsachinkr/Overriding_Model_Safety_Protections

We present the design and implementation of a custom discrete optimization technique for building rule lists over a categorical feature space. Our algorithm produces rule lists with optimal training performance, according to the regularized empirical risk, with a certificate of optimality. By leveraging algorithmic bounds, efficient data structures, and computational reuse, we achieve several orders of magnitude speedup in time and a massive reduction of memory consumption. We demonstrate that our approach produces optimal rule lists on practical problems in seconds. Our results indicate that it is possible to construct optimal sparse rule lists that are approximately as accurate as the COMPAS proprietary risk prediction tool on data from Broward County, Florida, but that are completely interpretable. This framework is a novel alternative to CART and other decision tree methods for interpretable modeling.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents, the primary vulnerability surface shifts from final outputs to intermediate execution traces. While safety guardrails are well-benchmarked for natural language responses, their efficacy remains largely unexplored within multi-step tool-use trajectories. To address this gap, we introduce TraceSafe-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess mid-trajectory safety. It encompasses 12 risk categories, ranging from security threats (e.g., prompt injection, privacy leaks) to operational failures (e.g., hallucinations, interface inconsistencies), featuring over 1,000 unique execution instances. Our evaluation of 13 LLM-as-a-guard models and 7 specialized guardrails yields three critical findings: 1) Structural Bottleneck: Guardrail efficacy is driven more by structural data competence (e.g., JSON parsing) than semantic safety alignment. Performance correlates strongly with structured-to-text benchmarks (ρ=0.79) but shows near-zero correlation with standard jailbreak robustness. 2) Architecture over Scale: Model architecture influences risk detection performance more significantly than model size, with general-purpose LLMs consistently outperforming specialized safety guardrails in trajectory analysis. 3) Temporal Stability: Accuracy remains resilient across extended trajectories. Increased execution steps allow models to pivot from static tool definitions to dynamic execution behaviors, actually improving risk detection performance in later stages. Our findings suggest that securing agentic workflows requires jointly optimizing for structural reasoning and safety alignment to effectively mitigate mid-trajectory risks.

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

Mobile graphical user interface (GUI) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in automating complex tasks, yet they introduce critical safety risks where a single erroneous action can lead to irreversible consequences. Existing safety mechanisms are primarily reactive, lacking the ability to assess risks before execution. In this paper, we introduce SeerGuard, a consequence-aware safety framework designed to mitigate these risks through pre-execution instruction-level screening and action-level risk assessment. Specifically, the action-level assessment analyzes agent-proposed actions within current GUI states, anticipating likely outcomes to identify risks before they are executed. To enable these capabilities, we construct a unified safety-augmented world model (SAWM) via multi-task learning, integrating semantic next-state prediction with safety risk assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SeerGuard generalizes effectively across diverse mobile GUI agents. On Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, it increases the safety-utility score from 0.191 to 0.596 at ω=0.8 and reduces the risk-cost score from 0.347 to 0.130 at α=0.8. Further analyses on our SAWM validate the effectiveness of the instruction-level screening, alongside the capability of action risk assessment and next-state prediction.

Detecting AI risks becomes more challenging as stronger models emerge and find novel methods such as Alignment Faking to circumvent these detection attempts. Inspired by how risky behaviors in humans (i.e., illegal activities that may hurt others) are sometimes guided by strongly-held values, we believe that identifying values within AI models can be an early warning system for AI's risky behaviors. We create LitmusValues, an evaluation pipeline to reveal AI models' priorities on a range of AI value classes. Then, we collect AIRiskDilemmas, a diverse collection of dilemmas that pit values against one another in scenarios relevant to AI safety risks such as Power Seeking. By measuring an AI model's value prioritization using its aggregate choices, we obtain a self-consistent set of predicted value priorities that uncover potential risks. We show that values in LitmusValues (including seemingly innocuous ones like Care) can predict for both seen risky behaviors in AIRiskDilemmas and unseen risky behaviors in HarmBench.

Ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning models in open-world deployment is a central challenge in AI safety. This thesis develops both algorithmic and theoretical foundations to address key reliability issues arising from distributional uncertainty and unknown classes, from standard neural networks to modern foundation models like large language models (LLMs). Traditional learning paradigms, such as empirical risk minimization (ERM), assume no distribution shift between training and inference, often leading to overconfident predictions on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. This thesis introduces novel frameworks that jointly optimize for in-distribution accuracy and reliability to unseen data. A core contribution is the development of an unknown-aware learning framework that enables models to recognize and handle novel inputs without labeled OOD data. We propose new outlier synthesis methods, VOS, NPOS, and DREAM-OOD, to generate informative unknowns during training. Building on this, we present SAL, a theoretical and algorithmic framework that leverages unlabeled in-the-wild data to enhance OOD detection under realistic deployment conditions. These methods demonstrate that abundant unlabeled data can be harnessed to recognize and adapt to unforeseen inputs, providing formal reliability guarantees. The thesis also extends reliable learning to foundation models. We develop HaloScope for hallucination detection in LLMs, MLLMGuard for defending against malicious prompts in multimodal models, and data cleaning methods to denoise human feedback used for better alignment. These tools target failure modes that threaten the safety of large-scale models in deployment. Overall, these contributions promote unknown-aware learning as a new paradigm, and we hope it can advance the reliability of AI systems with minimal human efforts.

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/.

Major cloud providers have employed advanced AI-based solutions like large language models to aid humans in identifying the root causes of cloud incidents. Despite the growing prevalence of AI-driven assistants in the root cause analysis process, their effectiveness in assisting on-call engineers is constrained by low accuracy due to the intrinsic difficulty of the task, a propensity for LLM-based approaches to hallucinate, and difficulties in distinguishing these well-disguised hallucinations. To address this challenge, we propose to perform confidence estimation for the predictions to help on-call engineers make decisions on whether to adopt the model prediction. Considering the black-box nature of many LLM-based root cause predictors, fine-tuning or temperature-scaling-based approaches are inapplicable. We therefore design an innovative confidence estimation framework based on prompting retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) that demand a minimal amount of information from the root cause predictor. This approach consists of two scoring phases: the LLM-based confidence estimator first evaluates its confidence in making judgments in the face of the current incident that reflects its ``grounded-ness" level in reference data, then rates the root cause prediction based on historical references. An optimization step combines these two scores for a final confidence assignment. We show that our method is able to produce calibrated confidence estimates for predicted root causes, validate the usefulness of retrieved historical data and the prompting strategy as well as the generalizability across different root cause prediction models. Our study takes an important move towards reliably and effectively embedding LLMs into cloud incident management systems.

The Internet of Things (IoT) triggers new types of cyber risks. Therefore, the integration of new IoT devices and services requires a self-assessment of IoT cyber security posture. By security posture this article refers to the cybersecurity strength of an organisation to predict, prevent and respond to cyberthreats. At present, there is a gap in the state of the art, because there are no self-assessment methods for quantifying IoT cyber risk posture. To address this gap, an empirical analysis is performed of 12 cyber risk assessment approaches. The results and the main findings from the analysis is presented as the current and a target risk state for IoT systems, followed by conclusions and recommendations on a transformation roadmap, describing how IoT systems can achieve the target state with a new goal-oriented dependency model. By target state, we refer to the cyber security target that matches the generic security requirements of an organisation. The research paper studies and adapts four alternatives for IoT risk assessment and identifies the goal-oriented dependency modelling as a dominant approach among the risk assessment models studied. The new goal-oriented dependency model in this article enables the assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex IoT systems and can be used for a quantitative self-assessment of IoT cyber risk posture.

Tool retrieval determines which external tools are exposed to an LLM agent for a user query or task, making retrieval a critical pre-execution safety boundary. Unlike document retrieval, tool retrieval exposes executable actions: a tool that is useful for one task may be unnecessary or risky for another. However, existing tool-retrieval methods primarily optimize semantic relevance, and safety evaluations often focus on failures after tool execution rather than risks introduced during retrieval. We study risk-aware tool retrieval, where the goal is to retrieve useful tools while reducing exposure to higher-risk tools. We propose a lightweight reranking framework on top of a frozen first-stage retriever. The framework models query-conditioned relevance and tool-level exposure risk separately, combines them through an explicit parameter controlling the tradeoff between safety and utility, smooths scores over a ToolGraph, and optionally applies rule-based safety constraints. To support retrieval-time safety evaluation, we annotate 6,108 tools across UltraTool and Seal-Tools with five ordinal risk levels and define metrics that measure risky-tool exposure in the top-k results. Experiments on UltraTool and Seal-Tools show that our approach improves the relevance--safety tradeoff over relevance-only retrievers and reranking baselines, with the rule-filtered variant providing a conservative operating point for safety-critical deployments. These findings indicate that retrieval-stage filtering can reduce the candidate action space exposed to agents before execution, complementing downstream tool-use safeguards. The code and supplementary materials are available at: https://github.com/qli447/risk-aware-tool-retrieval-release.

This paper introduces a multi-agent framework guided by Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist in the early stages of engineering design, a phase often characterized by vast parameter spaces and inherent uncertainty. Operating under a human-in-the-loop paradigm and demonstrated on the canonical problem of aerodynamic airfoil design, the framework employs a team of specialized agents: a Coding Assistant, a Design Agent, a Systems Engineering Agent, and an Analyst Agent - all coordinated by a human Manager. Integrated within a set-based design philosophy, the process begins with a collaborative phase where the Manager and Coding Assistant develop a suite of validated tools, after which the agents execute a structured workflow to systematically explore and prune a large set of initial design candidates. A key contribution of this work is the explicit integration of formal risk management, employing the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a quantitative metric to filter designs that exhibit a high probability of failing to meet performance requirements, specifically the target coefficient of lift. The framework automates labor-intensive initial exploration through a global sensitivity analysis conducted by the Analyst agent, which generates actionable heuristics to guide the other agents. The process culminates by presenting the human Manager with a curated final set of promising design candidates, augmented with high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. This approach effectively leverages AI to handle high-volume analytical tasks, thereby enhancing the decision-making capability of the human expert in selecting the final, risk-assessed design.

The rapid growth of video-based social media has increased users' exposure to harmful content, creating a need for reliable automated video safety detection. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show strong video understanding capabilities, existing harmful video detection systems face two key limitations: they typically reduce safety detection to binary classification, overlooking the inherently multi-label nature of unsafe videos, and they rely on static training objectives that do not support controllable precision-recall trade-offs, though the desired operating point may vary across moderation pipelines and unsafe categories. To address these gaps, we propose Adaptive Tversky Policy Optimization (ATPO), a reinforcement learning framework for Multi-label Video Safety Detection (Multi-VSD). ATPO introduces the Adaptive Tversky Reward (ATR), which dynamically adjusts false-positive and false-negative penalties during training to enable controllable precision-recall trade-offs. Experiments on SafeWatch-Bench and XD-Violence show that ATPO substantially improves multi-label performance, increasing the Jaccard Index from 40.66 to 75.44 on SafeWatch-Bench-Real. Moreover, ATR enables reliable steering of the precision-recall operating point, supporting deployment scenarios with heterogeneous policy requirements. Code and checkpoints are provided at https://bruceyg.github.io/ATPO-project-page/ .

Kimi K2.5 is an open-weight LLM that rivals closed models across coding, multimodal, and agentic benchmarks, but was released without an accompanying safety evaluation. In this work, we conduct a preliminary safety assessment of Kimi K2.5 focusing on risks likely to be exacerbated by powerful open-weight models. Specifically, we evaluate the model for CBRNE misuse risk, cybersecurity risk, misalignment, political censorship, bias, and harmlessness, in both agentic and non-agentic settings. We find that Kimi K2.5 shows similar dual-use capabilities to GPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5, but with significantly fewer refusals on CBRNE-related requests, suggesting it may uplift malicious actors in weapon creation. On cyber-related tasks, we find that Kimi K2.5 demonstrates competitive cybersecurity performance, but it does not appear to possess frontier-level autonomous cyberoffensive capabilities such as vulnerability discovery and exploitation. We further find that Kimi K2.5 shows concerning levels of sabotage ability and self-replication propensity, although it does not appear to have long-term malicious goals. In addition, Kimi K2.5 exhibits narrow censorship and political bias, especially in Chinese, and is more compliant with harmful requests related to spreading disinformation and copyright infringement. Finally, we find the model refuses to engage in user delusions and generally has low over-refusal rates. While preliminary, our findings highlight how safety risks exist in frontier open-weight models and may be amplified by the scale and accessibility of open-weight releases. Therefore, we strongly urge open-weight model developers to conduct and release more systematic safety evaluations required for responsible deployment.

AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot are rapidly transforming software development, but their safety remains deeply uncertain-especially in high-stakes domains like cybersecurity. Current red-teaming tools often rely on fixed benchmarks or unrealistic prompts, missing many real-world vulnerabilities. We present ASTRA, an automated agent system designed to systematically uncover safety flaws in AI-driven code generation and security guidance systems. ASTRA works in three stages: (1) it builds structured domain-specific knowledge graphs that model complex software tasks and known weaknesses; (2) it performs online vulnerability exploration of each target model by adaptively probing both its input space, i.e., the spatial exploration, and its reasoning processes, i.e., the temporal exploration, guided by the knowledge graphs; and (3) it generates high-quality violation-inducing cases to improve model alignment. Unlike prior methods, ASTRA focuses on realistic inputs-requests that developers might actually ask-and uses both offline abstraction guided domain modeling and online domain knowledge graph adaptation to surface corner-case vulnerabilities. Across two major evaluation domains, ASTRA finds 11-66% more issues than existing techniques and produces test cases that lead to 17% more effective alignment training, showing its practical value for building safer AI systems.