arXiv Computation and Language

Paved with True Intents: Intent-Aware Training Improves LLM Safety Classification Across Training Regimes

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 Computation and Language
Sep 30

Can Vision-Language Models Stay Helpful When Facing Implicit Risks? Intent-Privilege OPSD for Efficient Safety-Helpfulness Alignment

arXiv:2609.37837v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain vulnerable to cross-modal implicit risks: visual and textual inputs that appear benign in isolation can jointly el...

By Haotian Deng, Wenbin Xing, Gang Xu, Tao He, Jinkai Zheng, Chun Li, Zheng Zhu, Ming Li
arXiv AI
Oct 16

When Reasoning Is Not Enough: Proactive Inquiry for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper introduces SAFE-PRO, a method for enhancing safety in multimodal large language models by proactively asking clarifying questions when cross‑modal ambiguity poses intent‑level risks. SAFE‑PRO employs a Risk‑Conditioned Uncertainty signal that blends predictive entropy with a learned cross‑modal risk score to guide both question‑asking and path optimization, prioritizing safety while reducing over‑refusal. The authors also present the SSUI‑Dialog dataset and demonstrate that SAFE‑PRO outperforms existing approaches, including GPT‑4o and Claude‑3.5‑Sonnet, across multiple benchmarks.

By Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Xuelong Li
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Beyond Unsafe Detection: Counterfactually Anchored Evidence Attribution for Multi-Turn LLM Safety Failures

The paper introduces a counterfactually anchored evidence attribution approach for multi‑turn large language model safety failures. It presents a new dataset of 1,762 conversations, including adversarial, benign twins, and high‑risk vocabulary variants, and trains a lightweight hierarchical model that accurately predicts safety violations and attributes them to specific user turns and token spans. The model achieves high detection performance (F1 = 0.988) and significantly reduces adversarial confidence when top‑attributed tokens are removed, while maintaining low false‑positive rates on benign conversations.

By Srinivasan Subramanian, Kazi Aminul Islam, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan
arXiv AI
5d ago

Rethinking GRPO for Large Reasoning Model Safety Alignment

The paper "Rethinking GRPO for Large Reasoning Model Safety Alignment" identifies two failure modes in Group Relative Policy Optimization—advantage collapse and unsafe diversification—that weaken safety learning in large reasoning models. It proposes the Beacon framework, which includes Safety Signal Recovery (SSR) and Safety-Utility Decoupled Alignment (SUDA), to restore effective safety signals and mitigate over-refusal. Experiments on Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill models across eight benchmarks demonstrate that Beacon improves safety performance by up to 32.83 percentage points while keeping over-refusal low.

By Jiawei Chen, Yi Zhang, Jiawei Du, Zhonghou Lv, Tairan Chen, Junyuan Shang, Jinchang Hou, Xiao Yang, Yu Tian, Chenfu Bao, Chao Yu, Zhaoxia Yin
arXiv AI
Jul 21

A Dual-Hypothesis Reasoning Framework for LLM Guardrails

arXiv:2607. 17575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose ARBITER, a novel LLM guardrail framework that introduces two key ideas: (i) dual-hypothesis reasoning, a reasoning method for LLM guardrails that explicitly considers both safe and unsafe interpretations of a prompt before making a safety decision, and (ii) multi-component supervised fine-tuning (MC-SFT), a structured training loss for reasoning-based guardrails that decomposes LLM outputs into logical components and weights them according to their importance.

By Md Asiful Islam, Mihai Surdeanu
arXiv AI
Sep 1

SafeAtlas-VL: Beyond Binary Multimodal Safety with Large-Scale Data and Guard Models

SafeAtlas-VL introduces a large multimodal safety dataset with 1.5 million instances, rating image, request, and response risks on a five‑level ordinal scale across 15 harm categories and 55 subcategories. The accompanying SafeAtlas‑Bench provides 5,000 held‑out cases for evaluating ordinal predictions and continuous risk scores. Models trained on this data, including an 8B Guard model, achieve state‑of‑the‑art performance, outperforming prior benchmarks by about 4% in F1 score.

By Zongrui Wang, Xiangyang Zhu, Sicheng Wang, Han Wang, Dingyi Rong, Zeyu Zhang, Chunyi Li, Yue Shi, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Yuan Tian, Qi Jia, Yan Teng, Wei Sun, Ning Liu, Guangtao Zhai