arXiv AI By Kangkang Li, Kelvin Luu, Lily Ma, Tu Trinh, Ying Liu, Mohamed Elfeki

BARC-Bench: Benign Asks, Risky Consequences

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BARC-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 110 tasks across nine simulated workspace environments designed to expose the safety risks of underspecified user instructions for agents. The benchmark evaluates whether agents respect safety boundaries defined by workspace records, implicit environmental context, and unstated social norms, such as avoiding premature disclosure of an employee’s resignation. Results show that even the best model configurations fail to consistently act safely, with safe completion rates ranging from 9.1% to 72.7% and a 27.3% safety violation rate in the strongest setup.

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arXiv AI
Sep 10

AURA-Eval: Evaluation Framework for Acting Under Risk Awareness in LLM Agent Trajectories

arXiv:2609.06783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents operate in workflows where unsafe actions can have real consequences. Existing safety evaluations often reduce behavior to a single score,...

By Ruoxi Shang, Christina-Maria Androna, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Yu Feng, Aniruddhan Ramesh, Rico Angell, Shang Hong Sim, Chrysoula Zerva, Emmanouil Koukoumidis
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

The Cold-Start Safety Gap in LLM Agents

The paper investigates whether tool‑calling large language model agents maintain consistent safety throughout a conversation. It finds that agents are most vulnerable at the very start of a session, with safety improving significantly after completing a few regular agentic tasks—a phenomenon termed the cold‑start safety gap. The authors introduce the Safety Over Depth for Agents (SODA) benchmark to systematically study this effect, evaluate multiple models, and demonstrate that warming up agents with regular tasks before deployment enhances safety while preserving utility.

By Chung-En Sun, Linbo Liu, Tsui-Wei Weng