SafeEvolve is an experience-driven framework that co‑evolves a harness and policy to improve safety alignment for LLM‑based agents. It uses on‑policy trajectory safety evidence to update safety prompts and hierarchical skills, producing auditable harness artifacts. The policy is trained via a two‑stage SFT‑RL pipeline that bootstraps with the evolved harness and then refines behavior through verifier‑decomposed rewards, yielding a better safety‑utility tradeoff on benchmarks such as AgentDojo.
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
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
The paper investigates whether artificial evolution can replicate biological neuromodulation and diverse neuron types in indirectly encoded substrates. Experiments show that neuromodulation alone cannot overcome a 75% performance ceiling on parity tasks, but combining neuromodulation with per‑task activation function selection allows a single evolving genotype to achieve 100% success across five tasks. This demonstrates that both neuromodulation and evolvable computational primitives are necessary for multi‑behavioral open‑ended evolution.
By Romain Claret, Michael O'Neill, Paul Cotofrei, Kilian Stoffel
SafeEvolve is an experience-driven framework that co‑evolves a harness and policy to align large‑language‑model agents with safety goals. It uses completed on‑policy trajectories to update safety prompts and hierarchical skills, then applies a two‑stage SFT‑RL training loop that bootstraps the policy with the evolved harness and refines it through verifier‑augmented rewards. Experiments on agentic safety benchmarks show that SafeEvolve improves the safety‑utility tradeoff, achieving a three‑fold reduction in ASR on AgentDojo for Qwen3.5‑4B while increasing benign utility from 59.79% to 61.86%.
By Qinghua Mao, Wanying Qu, Dadi Guo, Leitao Yuan, Qingyu Liu, Yu Li, Guanxu Chen, Yanwei Fu, Xi Lin, Xia Hu, Dongrui Liu
arXiv:2608. 02684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating biological research, yet this same capability poses a critical biosecurity threat: models that assist in protein engineering can equally be prompted to generate predicted toxin-like sequences, potentially lowering the barrier to biological misuse.
By Shu Quan, Tianfang Hao, Sitong Fang, He Geng, Jiayi Zhou, Boyuan Chen, Kaile Wang, Donghai Hong, Juntao Dai, Yaodong Yang, Jiaming Ji
arXiv:2609.00051v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite extensive alignment efforts, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to generating unsafe content under adversarial prompting, yet the...
By Kuan-Lin Chu, Chung-En Sun, Tsui-Wei Weng
arXiv:2608. 01918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Harness design plays a critical role in agent performance by shaping how large language models (LLMs) perceive, reason over, and act within executable environments.
By Luan Zhang, Ruochen Zhou, Dandan Song, Zhengyu Chen, Yuhang Tian, Jun Yang, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Guangyuan Feng, Xudong Li, Yizhou Jin, Yan Xu
Frontier large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into scientific workflows, yet their growing biological capabilities may outpace current safeguards. To assess the biological risks of frontier models, we develop Intern-BioBreaker, a specialized bio-red-teaming model, together with an integrated computational-to-physical framework that couples model-level stress testing with wet-lab validation.
arXiv:2608. 09095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncovering the internal mechanisms underlying the safety capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for developing trustworthy artificial intelligence.
By Shuyi Miao, Wangjie Qiu, Pengyang Shao, Canran Xiao, Fei Shen, Zhiming Zheng, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv:2609.06934v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Post-hoc safety training (RLHF, DPO) is the dominant way to align large language models, yet jailbreaks (Zou et al., 2023b), fine-tuning attacks (Qi...
By Srikanth Malla, Chiho Choi, Joon Hee Choi
arXiv:2609.08175v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Harness self-evolution is the process by which an agent modifies its prompts, tools, code, or orchestration in response to task feedback while keeping...
By Qianshu Cai, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Nie, Maohao Ran, Huajiang Zheng, Jun Song, Xinmei Tian, Yike Guo, Wei Xue