arXiv AI
SAFESHIELD: A Decision-Organization Framework for Deployment-Time Safety of Small Language Models
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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22
SafeTune: A Unified Faithful Library for Auditing and Repairing Safety Drift in Fine-Tuned LLMs
SafeTune is a source‑available library that consolidates four safety‑intervention paradigms—post‑hoc weight recovery, safety‑constrained fine‑tuning, gradient‑based unlearning, and inference‑time steering—into a single, configuration‑driven workflow. It offers shared interpretability, evaluation, and deployment tools, and its modular registry allows easy addition of new methods, benchmarks, judges, models, and fine‑tuning domains. The authors demonstrate SafeTune with controlled comparisons and case studies in finance and medical deployments, showing how it characterizes safety drift, evaluates interventions on refusal‑behavior and capability metrics, and supports calibrated or layered mitigation.
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago
The Alignment Flywheel: A Governance-Centric Hybrid MAS for Architecture-Agnostic Safety
The paper introduces the Alignment Flywheel, a governance‑centric hybrid multi‑agent system (MAS) that separates decision generation from safety governance. It defines a Proposer that generates candidate trajectories, a Safety Oracle stack that evaluates safety, and an Enforcement layer that applies risk policies at runtime. A governance MAS oversees monitoring, red‑teaming, verification, and versioned release management, enabling patch‑local fixes to safety failures without retraining the Proposer. The architecture is implementation‑agnostic and is demonstrated in two scenarios: a learned spatial Oracle and a clinical GenAI proxy. The authors provide open‑source code at https://github.com/decide-ugent/Alignment-Flywheel.
arXiv AI
Sep 23
Trustworthy Agentic AI: Failure Modes, Mitigation Strategies, and a Lifecycle Framework for Autonomous LLM Systems
The paper discusses the trustworthiness of agentic AI systems built on large language models, highlighting new security and operational risks such as indirect prompt injection, memory contamination, and cross‑session data leakage. It categorizes failure modes, reviews mitigation strategies—including instruction hierarchies, context isolation, and constrained tool use—and introduces the Trustworthy Agent Development Lifecycle (TADL), a six‑phase framework for specification, design, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring. The authors note that TADL has not yet been empirically validated but offers a structured foundation for developing more secure and accountable agentic systems, and they call for improved benchmarks and future research priorities.
arXiv AI
Aug 18
Toward Safe LLM Agents: A Survey of Specification, Verification, and Enforcement
arXiv:2608. 14590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly perform irreversible real-world actions, including database updates, API calls, file operations, and autonomous use of tools.
arXiv AI
Jun 30
SafePyramid: A Hierarchical Benchmark for In-context Policy Guardrailing
arXiv:2606. 29887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In real-world applications, guardrails are often expected to identify unsafe user-model interactions according to application-specific safety policies, rather than relying on predefined risk taxonomies.
arXiv AI
Aug 19
HarnessRisk: A Lifecycle-Oriented Benchmark for Agent Harness Safety
HarnessRisk is a lifecycle-oriented benchmark for evaluating safety in agent harnesses that manage tools, extensions, state, permissions, and external actions. It defines six operational phases—Harness Configuration, Capability Extension, Runtime Operation, State Persistence, Action Control, and Incident Recovery—and includes 128 sandboxed cases pairing benign user objectives with adversarial instructions. Across three harnesses, six language models, and 14 configurations, attack success rates vary from 12.6% to 80.9%, with the most vulnerable phase being Harness Configuration. "whyItMatters":"The benchmark demonstrates that safety failures can arise in multiple harness responsibilities and that even explicit risk detection does not guarantee safe action, underscoring the need for comprehensive evaluation across model and harness configurations."