Operational safety in high-stakes domains such as industrial process control, autonomous, and safety-critical systems, demand reliable hazard identification. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating safety analysis tasks, single-turn, monolithic inference is brittle: it lacks the self-correction, deliberation, and contextual refinement that safety engineers apply iteratively. In this paper, we introduce HAZDIAL, a framework that investigates whether structured agentic dialogue-multi-agent, multi-turn interactions improves the quality of NLP- based hazard identification over single-pass baselines. We systematically compare two dialogue modalities: adversarial debate and constructive discussion, and propose an algorithm-based agentic interaction optimization. We evaluate all configurations against a curated golden dataset using standard classification metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, F1) and novel dialogue metrics. This work advances the intersection of dialogue systems, multi-agent reasoning, and AI safety, providing an empirical evidence for dialogue-driven hazard analysis.
Despite remarkable capability in multi-modal understanding, deploying Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in open-ended conversational scenarios introduces safety risks that remain poorly addressed by existing alignment methods. Unlike simple malicious visual question and answer (VQA) pairs , multi-turn interactions enable adversaries to incrementally reconstruct harmful intent across dialogues, progressively bypassing safety constraints in ways that are difficult to detect at any individual turn. Meanwhile, conventional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches are unsuitable for this situation: designed primarily for VQA tasks, they neither capture cross-turn risk dynamics nor scale efficiently without costly manual preference annotation. To close this gap, we introduce \textbf{MINT-Safe}, an open-source visual multi-turn training dataset comprising 11,270 multi-image dialogues and 500 refusal VQA pairs, constructed via multi-agent interaction with text-to-image (T2I) tool-call augmentation. Building on MINT-Safe, we propose \textbf{TAD-Align}, a dialogue safety alignment framework centered on a turn-aware dual-objective reward function. Rather than treating all dialogue turns uniformly, TAD-Align leverages rollout-based safety score variance to dynamically identify turns where the model exhibits inconsistent safety behavior, and adaptively up-weights these turns during optimization. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-7B demonstrate reductions of over 10% in Attack Success Rate (ASR), alongside improvements of at least 8% in harmlessness and 13% in helpfulness on multi-modal multi-turn safety benchmarks, while preserving general model capabilities.
Large language models (LLMs) serving as planners in tool-using autonomous agents introduce dynamic reliability risks in multi-turn execution. While single-turn safety mechanisms are relatively mature, extended interactions reveal structural vulnerabilities where initial alignment degrades over time. This paper empirically characterizes two observed failure modes across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs: Safety Drift, the gradual erosion of declared safety intent leading to constraint-violating actions (e.g., textual refusal followed by reconnaissance and unsafe execution), and Operational Hallucination, persistent repetitive tool calls indicative of flawed state perception (e.g., livelocks even in legitimate tasks). Through controlled multi-turn evaluation on high-stakes ethical dilemmas, malicious requests, and benign controls, we quantify these phenomena using declaration-action gap and livelock metrics, demonstrating their cross-model prevalence under direct execution protocols. Root-cause analysis attributes the instabilities to the decoupling of reasoning context from execution state in current agent loops. We propose an Action-Aware Supervision Layer - a lightweight, plug-and-play architectural blueprint incorporating intent-action consistency checks, runtime state tracking, and forced termination primitives. Post-hoc simulation on captured failure trajectories shows the layer can intercept observed violations without false positives on benign cases. This work advances agent reliability by shifting focus from linguistic safeguards to enforceable architectural mechanisms for responsible agentic AI.
Multimodal Large Language Models are increasingly adopted as autonomous agents in interactive environments, yet their ability to proactively address safety hazards remains insufficient. We introduce SafetyALFRED, built upon the embodied agent benchmark ALFRED, augmented with six categories of real-world kitchen hazards. While existing safety evaluations focus on hazard recognition through disembodied question answering (QA) settings, we evaluate eleven state-of-the-art models from the Qwen, Gemma, and Gemini families on not only hazard recognition, but also active risk mitigation through embodied planning. Our experimental results reveal a significant alignment gap: while models can accurately recognize hazards in QA settings, average mitigation success rates for these hazards are low in comparison. Our findings demonstrate that static evaluations through QA are insufficient for physical safety, thus we advocate for a paradigm shift toward benchmarks that prioritize corrective actions in embodied contexts. We open-source our code and dataset under https://github.com/sled-group/SafetyALFRED.git