arXiv AI By Siyi Gu, Kunhan Gao, Chao Peter Yang, Sukanta Ganguly, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan

StepSafe: Learning Timely Intervention with Context-Aware Safety Reasoning

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StepSafe introduces a training framework called ASPO that focuses on step‑level timely intervention in agentic systems. It aligns decisions with their respective prefixes, rewards actions that fit the current stage, and uses adaptive feedback self‑distillation to credit reasoning. The resulting StepSafe guardrail achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on five agent‑safety benchmarks, improving the safety‑utility Pareto curve with a Youden’s J of 53.0 for a 4B model.

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