Organizations: Department of Construction Management, University of Washington, United States · PCL Industrial Management Inc, Canada · Department of Computer Science, University of Alberta, Canada · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada
Construction safety management still struggles to produce daily safety bulletins (DSBs), structured daily communications that identify site-specific hazards, convey safety protocols, and set preventive measures for workers. Manual DSB creation takes 2-3 hours daily and yields inconsistent quality, with 25% of crews never conducting pretask planning (Olson et al., 2016), diverting safety personnel from field supervision. This study proposes the Lightweight Multi-Agent DSB System (LM-DSB), which integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a locally deployable Large Language Model (LLM) to automate DSB generation on consumer-grade personal computers. LM-DSB coordinates specialized planner, researcher, and writer agents in a hierarchical architecture, enhanced by domain-specific fine-tuning on construction safety documentation and RAG grounding in 37 health, safety, and environment (HSE) documents. A two-phase validation assessed feasibility. Phase 1 comparative evaluation showed the multi-agent RAG system (Llama 3-8B) outperformed all alternative configurations, with strong lexical alignment and coherence (TF-IDF: 0.70, BLEU: 0.39, ROUGE-1: 0.66) and near-complete document generation (length ratio: 1.01 vs. 0.39 for single-agent RAG). Phase 2 expert evaluation (N=40) confirmed practical acceptability (mean scores 3.50-4.20 on a 5-point scale), particularly in regulatory compliance (4.20) and factual accuracy (4.10). The findings show that architectural design enables lightweight models to handle safety-critical documentation on consumer-grade hardware, advancing technology democratization in construction safety management. Limitations include knowledge base scope, language constraints, and lack of field deployment validation; future work should address multimodal integration and workflow adoption.
Construction-safety models must handle concrete deployment risks, such as a worker standing near a scaffold edge without guardrails, rather than only recognize common objects in curated images. Yet real inspection archives are redundant, long-tailed, and collected across changing sites and months. We introduce SafeBuild-Bench, a metadata-driven benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models on construction safety under realistic temporal and site variation. It is mined from 100K+ industrial image-text records and contains 3,314 task instances from over 3,000 expert-verified images, covering multiple-choice hazard identification and free-form hazard description. To make expert verification scalable, we develop GEMS, a graph-enhanced multimodal selection pipeline that combines a proxy-model confusion signal with graph-based diversity to identify informative candidates from redundant streams. On public instruction-tuning data, GEMS-selected subsets preserve robustness-oriented performance under small data budgets. On SafeBuild-Bench, current MLLMs remain far from reliable construction-safety understanding, with the best overall score near 60. We release the benchmark, evaluation scripts, and GEMS codebase at https://github.com/safebuild/gems.
Yi Cui, Zilin Wang, Yijie Xu +5
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China · School of Management Northwest Polytechnical University Xi’an Xi’an, China +4
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has intensified the requirement for reliable safety evaluation to uncover model vulnerabilities. To this end, numerous LLM safety evaluation benchmarks are proposed. However, existing benchmarks generally rely on labor-intensive manual curation, which causes excessive time and resource consumption. They also exhibit significant redundancy and limited difficulty. To alleviate these problems, we introduce SafetyFlow, the first agent-flow system designed to automate the construction of LLM safety benchmarks. SafetyFlow can automatically build a comprehensive safety benchmark in only four days without any human intervention by orchestrating seven specialized agents, significantly reducing time and resource cost. Equipped with versatile tools, the agents of SafetyFlow ensure process and cost controllability while integrating human expertise into the automatic pipeline. The final constructed dataset, SafetyFlowBench, contains 23,446 queries with low redundancy and strong discriminative power. Our contribution includes the first fully automated benchmarking pipeline and a comprehensive safety benchmark. We evaluate the safety of 49 advanced LLMs on our dataset and conduct extensive experiments to validate our efficacy and efficiency.
Allowing large language models (LLMs) to retrieve information from a set of trusted documents can increase reliability and reduce hallucination. However, recent work has demonstrated that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can have unintended side effects on the overall safety of the generated responses, when prompted for harmful or dangerous content. A clearer understanding of the mechanisms leading to this result is needed, as increasing numbers of end users turn to RAG to incorporate corporate documents and knowledge bases into LLM-based systems. We introduce RAG-Safety-Bench, a benchmark to measure the safety impact of RAG on LLM models. By removing the confounding effect of retriever quality, and cleanly separating the problem into four conditions -- non-RAG, RAG with an oracle document containing the answer to the harmful request, RAG with documents related to the harmful request but without the specific answer, and RAG with random, safe documents -- the benchmark isolates the impacts of different factors in the observed safety degradation. We report results across five open-source LLMs, showing an inverse relationship between benign and unsafe capability, strong evidence that baseline safety guardrails do not lead to downstream safety guarantees in the RAG case, and model-specific support for previous findings that even benign documents can lead to unsafe generation in retrieval-enabled systems.
Adithiyan Rajan Indira Saravanan, Kathleen C. Fraser
Faculty of Engineering University of Ottawa Ottawa, Canada