Safeguarding language model agents requires assessing complete execution trajectories under context-dependent safety policies. Existing policy-aware safeguards mainly rely on prompting or supervised f...
arXiv:2606. 10228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a prerequisite for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical domains.
By Kaustubh Mani, Yann Pequignot, Vincent Mai, Liam Paull
arXiv:2606. 01991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly leverage the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to operate in complex environments, the expansion of their action spaces offers agents unsafe capabilities and underscores the risk of power-seeking.
By Lichao Wang, Zhaoxing Ren, Tianzhuo Yang, Jiaming Ji, Chi Harold Liu, Yaodong Yang, Juntao Dai
arXiv:2606. 15385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward hacking, where AI systems exploit misspecified objectives to achieve high reward without satisfying intended goals, remains a central challenge in AI safety.
By \"Omer Veysel \c{C}a\u{g}atan, Xuandong Zhao
The paper introduces new evaluation metrics for safe reinforcement learning that go beyond average safety guarantees by examining how often and how severely safety bounds are violated, consistency across tasks and bounds, and the relationship between training-time and final policy behavior. It also proposes a safety tier system for categorizing algorithms and presents empirical safety evaluations on multiple navigation tasks. The authors recommend reporting aggregate metrics, distributional data, and task‑specific results together, and provide an open‑source suite, SafeRLEval, to facilitate reliable safety assessment.
By Lindsay Spoor, Aske Plaat, Thomas Moerland
arXiv:2606. 05805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based guardrails typically safeguard agents by evaluating proposed actions or inputs before execution, producing safety signals such as binary allow/deny decisions, risk categories, and/or explanatory rationales about potential policy violations.
By Yuhao Sun, Jiacheng Zhang, Shaanan Cohney, Zhexin Zhang, Feng Liu, Xingliang Yuan
arXiv:2609.13734v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world high-stakes applications, effective governance has become essential. Existing...
By Yuanchen Bei, Zhengzhang Chen, Yanjun Zhao, Haoyu Wang, Hanghang Tong, Haifeng Chen
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:2607. 16210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly applied in complex, safety-critical domains, yet the lack of rigorous behavioral guarantees for neural network-based policies remains a major barrier to deployment.
By Luca Marzari, Ezio Bartocci, Enrico Marchesini
arXiv:2606. 31320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe online reinforcement learning requires policies to respect safety constraints while maintaining smooth optimization dynamics.
By Hongpeng Cao, Liqun Zhao, Yuliang Gu, Naira Hovakimyan, Lui Sha, Marco Caccamo
Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content. In this work, we reveal that this advanced safety awareness inadvertently introduces a fatal vulnerability.
arXiv:2509. 25582v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) is an emerging RL paradigm where an agent, after pretraining, can adapt to out-of-distribution test tasks without any parameter updates, instead relying on an expanding context of interaction history.
By Amir Moeini, Minjae Kwon, Alper Kamil Bozkurt, Yuichi Motai, Rohan Chandra, Lu Feng, Shangtong Zhang