arXiv Computation and Language

Safin-1.5: Safety-Native Architecture and Verifiable Reasoning for Recursive Safety Improvement

Safin-1.5 is a large language model that incorporates a safety‑native architecture and a recursive safety improvement loop to enhance its own safety while maintaining utility. The architecture uses persistent safety states and hazardous‑knowledge disentanglement to isolate and remove risky knowledge with minimal impact on general capabilities. An inference‑time harness extends the model’s abilities to formal reasoning by combining language understanding with symbolic inference and verification, enabling the construction of checkable proofs.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

ReSI: Recursive Safety Improvement toward Resistant and Resilient AI

ReSI is a recursive safety improvement framework that iteratively applies diverse red‑teaming methods to identify vulnerabilities in AI models, develops training recipes, and selects the update with the greatest safety gain while retaining capability. Across four dense and mixture‑of‑experts models, ReSI matches or surpasses frontier models on both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution safety benchmarks, and outperforms alignment baselines on nearly all safety evaluations. The framework notably reduces the mean X‑Teaming attack success rate from 86.01% to 31.45%, outperforming GPT‑5.6‑Luna’s 56.69% and demonstrating stronger resilience to unseen attacks.

By Jingnan Zheng, Dongcheng Zhang, Yi Zhang, Ming Zhang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Youbang Sun, An Zhang, Xiangnan He, Tat-Seng Chua, Xia Hu, Bowen Zhou, Chaochao Lu, Xiang Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Evolutionary Safety of Recursive Self-Improving AI: Taxonomy, Risk Discovery, and Evaluation

The paper introduces the concept of Evolutionary Safety for recursive self-improving AI, focusing on how safety properties evolve as an AI system and its successors change. It identifies key risks such as intent drift, error accumulation, and safety-property erosion, and presents a taxonomy covering agent state, model state, evaluation, environment, and update mechanisms. The authors propose methods for discovering and evaluating evolutionary risks, and outline governance principles for modification, selection, authorization, provenance, and recovery, while highlighting open problems for maintaining safety in persistent, adaptive, and recursively self-improving systems.

By Chang Gong, Jingping Bi, Di Yao, Xinjian Liang, Chao Xiang, Ruijie Guo
arXiv AI
Jul 8

DT-Guard: Intent-Driven Reasoning-Active Training for Reasoning-Free LLM Safety Guardrail

arXiv:2607. 06326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed in open-world applications require safety guardrails that are both robust to complex risks and efficient enough for low-latency runtime moderation.

By He Liu, Changtao Miao, Xinjie Yang, Tianle Song, Yin Wu, Junchi Chen, Bintao He, Xinyuan Zhang, Bo Zhang, Shi Yan, Wei Lu, Wei Wang, Danyang Xu, Jiansheng Cai, Zhe Li
arXiv AI
Aug 11

SHE: Trajectory-driven Safety Harness Evolution for LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 09885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The safety of large language model (LLM) agents depends not only on model weights but also on the agent harness that manages context, memory, tools, permissions, and runtime control.

By Wanying Qu, Qinghua Mao, Yu Li, Jiyao Liu, Xin Zhang, Dadi Guo, Yanxu Zhu, Qingyu Liu, Leitao Yuan, Xi Lin, Shanfeng Zhu, Yanwei Fu, Jing Shao, Xia Hu, Dongrui Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 16

StepSafe: Learning Timely Intervention with Context-Aware Safety Reasoning

StepSafe introduces a training framework called ASPO that focuses on step‑level timely intervention in agentic systems. It aligns decisions with their respective prefixes, rewards actions that fit the current stage, and uses adaptive feedback self‑distillation to credit reasoning. The resulting StepSafe guardrail achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on five agent‑safety benchmarks, improving the safety‑utility Pareto curve with a Youden’s J of 53.0 for a 4B model.

By Siyi Gu, Kunhan Gao, Chao Peter Yang, Sukanta Ganguly, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan
arXiv AI
Aug 26

TRACE: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Large Reasoning Models

TRACE is a new benchmark that evaluates the safety of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across the entire inference pipeline, including prompts, reasoning traces, and final responses. It provides prompts in two languages covering nine risk categories and ten attack strategies, and for each prompt four LRMs generate traces and responses that are annotated for safety with supporting evidence extracted from the source text. Evaluation of 18 guardrail models on TRACE shows that detecting unsafe content in reasoning traces is much harder than in prompts or final responses, and that current models struggle to extract the necessary evidence.

By Zhenyu Wu, Siyuan Chen, Changchun Yang, Jiaqi Dong, Min Zhou, Ali Almadan, Talal Hammad, Faisal Wahbo, Aminullah Tora, Mona Alshahrani, Xin Gao