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...
RePolicy is a safeguard that learns to both select the appropriate safety policy from a library and assess agent behavior against it. It processes an agent trajectory and a set of candidate policies, chooses the best-matching policy, applies its requirements, and predicts safety. The authors created PolicyTraj-20K, a dataset of over 20,000 annotated trajectories, and trained RePolicy with supervised and reinforcement learning, achieving top performance on six benchmarks and 19 baselines.
By Houcheng Jiang, Boxuan Zhang, Qiyong Zhong, Junfeng Fang, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He
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
PROACT-Agent is a framework designed to provide proactive runtime oversight for large language model agents, aiming to prevent irreversible environmental harm by enabling real‑time guardrails. It introduces three key components: Progressive Trajectory Unrolling, Reasoning‑Augmented Causal Rectification, and Culturally‑Aware Data Localization, which together address safety drift and enforce temporal consistency. The accompanying PROACT‑Bench, a bilingual safety benchmark with 155,780 labeled states, demonstrates the framework’s effectiveness, achieving high unsafe‑class F1 scores and significantly reducing attack success rates in AgentDojo.
By Ding Jia, Wei Liu, Xianglong Du, Yingjie Li, Yingqing Yang, Huili Yu, Zhangsong Zhan, Chu Zhou
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
The paper introduces Safety to Competence (S2C), a two‑stage reinforcement learning framework that first learns a safety filter and then trains a competitive task policy while embedding the filter. By separating safety synthesis from task learning, S2C reduces training complexity and prevents the policy from being exploited by adversarial attacks. Experiments on simulated touchdown games show that S2C achieves higher win rates, better Elo ratings, and lower exploitability than eight safe‑RL baselines, and hardware tests confirm its competence against a human opponent.
By Ruihan Wu, Rui Yang, Donggeon David Oh, Duy Nguyen, Haimin Hu
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
Sapien is a policy engine that enforces stateful contextual policies for autonomous AI agents, specifying allowed tool‑call sequences with an extended regular expression that includes stateful predicates, deferred policy generation, and scoped semantic checks. The system maintains performance close to an unconstrained agent while significantly reducing malicious actions, ruling out 93‑95% of attacks on AgentDojo and 62‑85% on Toolathlon, outperforming traditional tool allowlists on long‑horizon tasks.
By Corinn Tiffany, Wen Zhang, Eugene Bagdasarian, Lillian Tsai