Safeguard

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and World-Action Models (WAMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their generated actions may violate hard physical constraints and therefore be unsafe or infeasible for deployment. Existing safety approaches either optimize statistical safety objectives without deterministic per-step guarantees or correct unsafe actions only during inference, creating a mismatch between policy training and execution. We introduce ActSafeGuard, a differentiable and training-aligned safeguard layer for flow-matching based policies. ActSafeGuard integrates hard action feasibility into policy learning, not merely treating safety as an inference-time external component. Through an analytical ray-scaling operator design, ActSafeGuard enables boundary-aware gradients to guide the model to naturally learn constrained manifolds. Extensive experiments on multiple standard foundation backbones ($π_{0.5}$ and Fast-WAM) across various tasks demonstrate that ActSafeGuard consistently achieves a $100\%$ step safety rate while fully preserving or even boosting task success rates, providing a scalable and minimally invasive solution for safe embodied AI deployment.

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly advanced zero-shot task planning for embodied agents. However, most LLM- and VLM-driven methods struggle to generate safe high-level actions due to a lack of physical risk awareness, particularly under partial observability, where hazards lie outside the immediate field of view. To address this challenge, we propose a novel safe task-planning framework, SafeMem, which constructs and maintains a long-term semantic graph memory of the open and dynamic environment. Based on egocentric observations, the proposed framework incrementally accumulates knowledge about surrounding objects and their relationships with a graph. Then, an LLM-based risk predictor evaluates candidate actions using the graph memory, triggering a conservatism-modulated replanning loop with explanations for detected hazards. Extensive experiments on the IS-Bench benchmark and a real-world robot platform demonstrate that the SafeMem framework substantially improves safe success rates compared to state-of-the-art VLM-driven task planners. Video results are available on our webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/safemem.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong progress on vision-language tasks, yet their reliability in safety-critical settings remains underexplored. Fire-smoke understanding is central to public safety and disaster response, but most existing benchmarks lack diverse real-world scenarios and context-aware evaluation. We introduce SAFIRE, a large-scale benchmark for fire-smoke understanding in MLLMs, comprising 83K captioned images from 20 scenarios and 193K multiple-choice VQA (MCVQA) generated from a 9.7K-image subset, spanning 10 evaluation dimensions from basic perception to higher-order reasoning. A GPT-5.4-assisted multi-stage verification pipeline with MLLM majority voting ensures annotation quality. Evaluating ten open-source MLLMs (8B-38B) yields an average accuracy of 61.9%, exposing major gaps in safety-critical reasoning. We further show that adapting vision encoders with only 7% of our domain-specific data boosts fire-scene classification accuracy from 20.1% to 64.5%, indicating that carefully curated data can yield substantial gains even when data volume is limited. All datasets, models, and code are available at https://risys-lab.github.io/SAFIRE/.

Existing safety alignment methods for vision-language models usually modify the model behavior globally: once the safety parameters are trained or loaded, they participate in both unsafe and already-safe generations. This always-on intervention can unnecessarily perturb the model's original reasoning path and degrade general multimodal capabilities. We argue that safety alignment should be an on-demand intervention rather than a permanent modification to every decoding trajectory. To this end, we propose a streaming recognition and gated LoRA framework for intrinsic VLM safety. During autoregressive generation, a lightweight recognizer estimates whether the current pre-token generation state is safe or unsafe. Its output updates the LoRA gate for the following decoding step; otherwise, generation follows the frozen-backbone policy. The LoRA module is trained from unsafe prefixes, transition statements, and safe continuations, so that it learns to redirect unsafe generations back to safe responses after activation. Experiments across multiple safety and general-purpose benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in post-alignment settings.

Industrial inspection pipelines often restore a measured image before a detector acts on it, yet restoration can suppress detector-supported defect structure or create clean-region activations. We formulate restoration as a selective action problem over the measured display, five restored candidates, and review. SafeRestore ranks candidates with action-specific fitted scores, chooses a gate on threshold-tuning data, and evaluates the fixed gate on a disjoint certification sample with two one-sided exact binomial bounds: one for the positive-conditional evidence-loss incident rate and one for the all-accepted excess-activation incident rate. The guarantee is marginal for one policy fixed before its certification outcomes are observed, under an image-level i.i.d. working model. In a retrospective split-sample study of 4,591 public Carinthia-S images, the protocol yields auditable risk-coverage behavior. The primary all-action policy passes in one of five training repetitions (12.0% +/- 26.9% pass-gated test coverage when failures count as zero), whereas fixed bicubic and reduced-complexity variants pass more often. On reserved morphologies, evidence-loss incidence rises to 81.1-90.3%, and KolektorSDD lacks both detector competence and enough positive certification images for the stated target. The contribution is therefore an auditable, detector-relative framework for deciding when a transformed image may be returned automatically and when review remains necessary -- not a claim that adaptive routing outperforms simpler policies on the present evidence.

Safeguards in deployed LLM services are evaluated by refusal, attack success, and policy violation rates. Those rates characterize how a control performed on the requests it was tested on. A deployment has to answer a different question: how much help with harmful tasks the service still gives an attacker who keeps adapting or finds another way in. We determine what each reported result implies for that question, allowing results from different safeguard families to be compared under one deployment criterion. The evidence requirements are strongly asymmetric. One attack that obtains harmful help from the deployed service suffices to establish that such help remains, and such attacks appear repeatedly in the coded record. Establishing that little remains cannot follow from the safeguard's own numbers alone; it also requires evidence about what the surrounding system still allows after the safeguard performs its local function. Such evidence is supported or derived in only a small minority of the depth-coded claims, and one such claim bounds its scoped residual. A better local score is therefore not, by itself, a stronger claim about the deployment. Safeguard research cannot stop at raising local scores; a gain has to be judged by whether it makes a deployed system any safer.

Long-horizon complex tasks require foundation models to accumulate information, maintain internal states, and adapt over extended interactions. Safety should be an intrinsic property of the model itself, rather than a behavioral constraint relying solely on external safeguards or post-hoc alignment such as supervised fine-tuning. This motivates Safety from Within, where safety-relevant capabilities are represented and invoked through the model's native computation. We present Safin-1, a family of foundation models realizing this principle through memory routing and state evolution. Safin-1 is built on Memory-Anchor Routing across Context History (MARCH), a network architecture that maintains structured memory states and selectively retrieves relevant historical information through content-conditioned routing. It supports test-time adaptation of persistent capability states without repeatedly modifying the backbone, enabling controlled specialization over a shared foundation. We investigate this interface on downstream safety tasks through a Safety State, demonstrating effective state-based adaptation with substantial safety improvements. More broadly, the routed-state interface unifies contextual memory and persistent capability adaptation within the model's native computation, reframing memory from a passive record of prior context into an active substrate for maintaining and evolving model behavior. Evaluations across general capabilities, long-context understanding, retrieval, and efficiency further validate Safin-1. These findings provide a path toward safety as a state-native and adaptively maintainable capability. This work is only an initial architectural exploration of Safety from Within, and substantial further work is needed to realize this broader vision.

Text-to-Video (T2V) generative models are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks in real-world deployment, leading them to produce harmful or inappropriate content. Existing defense approaches mainly rely on input filtering or reconstruction, which not only incur high computational latency but also tend to distort semantics. To address these issues, we experimentally and systematically analyze the differences between clean and jailbreak samples in the cross-attention feature space, revealing for the first time a cumulative separation effect and a progressively increasing trend of linear separability between the two during the diffusion process. Based on this insight, we propose SafeCA, a feature-level defense mechanism for safe cross-attention localization and regularization. Firstly, we identify key defensive regions and values through attention stability analysis using cross-attention features collected from clean prompts within a single inference. Secondly, SafeCA mitigates anomalous activations via attention masking with energy normalization and introduces a lightweight semantic-space adapter to redirect abnormal semantic flows. Furthermore, we detect and suppress potentially malicious tokens by back-propagating feature anomaly signals to the input cue words, thereby enhancing the deployability of the defense in commercial models. Experimental results show that SafeCA reduces the jailbreak success rate by about 20% on mainstream T2V models, adds almost no inference overhead (+0.1s), and maintains good text-video semantic consistency. Overall, SafeCA provides an architecture-level, deployable protection paradigm for T2V generation models.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit visual inputs to bypass safety alignment inherited from their language backbones. We propose SafeCap, a reinforcement-learning framework that aligns LVLMs through learned self-captioning. SafeCap trains a policy model to first generate a safety-relevant image caption and then produce a final answer; the caption is further optimized by whether it enables a frozen LLM to reach a safety-aligned decision. This caption-mediated objective encourages the policy to expose visual cues relevant to safe response generation rather than relying solely on direct refusal supervision. Across five multimodal safety benchmarks and six vision-utility benchmarks, SafeCap substantially improves aggregate safety performance under its intended DirectCap protocol, with gains of 3.7-19.0 points in safety average across four model settings while maintaining comparable or improved vision utility. Under controlled comparisons on matched backbones and data, SafeCap outperforms safety SFT, DPO, and SafeGRPO, demonstrating the effectiveness of caption-mediated reinforcement learning for multimodal safety alignment.

The deployment of autonomous robotic systems in chemistry laboratories is accelerating experimental workflows and providing the foundational data for AI-driven scientific discovery. However, despite the success of data-driven methods in acquiring dexterous skills, safety remains a primary barrier to their deployment in high-risk domains, such as early-stage materials chemistry experiments. Specifically, learning-based policies frequently struggle to distinguish between safe and unsafe actions, leading to overconfident extrapolation and potentially catastrophic failures. To mitigate these safety risks, we propose SAFE-CHEM, an uncertainty-aware framework designed for robust, learning-based robotic chemists. Our approach leverages an ensemble of recurrent neural network-based imitation learning policies to quantify epistemic uncertainty online through the variance of action predictions. By characterising the success-conditioned density of this variance using kernel density estimation, we introduce a hybrid control architecture that autonomously switches from the learned policy to a deterministic, rule-based backup controller when uncertainty exceeds a calibrated safety threshold. We evaluate SAFE-CHEM across three fundamental laboratory manipulation tasks, where our empirical results demonstrate that this hybrid strategy improves overall task success rates and reduces critical safety violations compared to traditional single-policy baselines. Finally, we demonstrate the practical viability of the framework through zero-shot sim-to-real transfer onto a physical Franka Production 3 robot manipulator.

Industrial-safety understanding requires more than detecting workers, equipment, and personal protective equipment. Models must also assess compliance, identify hazardous interactions, explain potential accident mechanisms, and recommend preventive actions. Existing safety datasets primarily focus on visual perception or isolated violation recognition and provide limited supervision for evidence-grounded reasoning. We introduce SafeSceneReason, a multimodal industrial-safety reasoning benchmark and companion training corpus that connects workplace scenes with knowledge from occupational accident investigations. SafeSceneReason combines two complementary data-construction pipelines. The scene-centric pipeline converts annotated workplace images into executable safety scene graphs and generates deterministic answers through program execution over objects, relations, and safety rules. The report-centric pipeline extracts figures and contextual evidence from accident reports and constructs multimodal questions using evidence graphs, explicit information boundaries, multi-step reasoning paths, and iterative verification. The resulting resource contains 110,581 verified scene-centric question--answer pairs and 13,114 refined report-centric question--answer pairs, covering perception, spatial and quantitative reasoning, compliance assessment, evidence synthesis, causal analysis, and mitigation-oriented decision making. Evaluation of representative proprietary and open-source vision--language models reveals substantial performance differences and persistent weaknesses in comparative, technical, and multi-evidence reasoning, demonstrating that strong general visual understanding does not yet guarantee reliable industrial-safety reasoning.

Long-horizon agents increasingly use persistent memory and tools to take actions with external side effects. A central failure mode is premature commitment: an agent acts before resolving whether its memory grounding is stale, conflicting, incomplete, or corrupted. We formalize this problem as safe commitment under memory uncertainty and introduce SafeCommit, a risk controlled layer between agent reasoning and external execution. The layer constructs a calibrated set of plausible latent worlds from memory, observations, tool outputs, provenance, and policy constraints. It permits a side effectful action only when a conformal action certificate shows that the action is safe in every retained world. Otherwise, it selects a low-side-effect probe that targets the worlds blocking certification, or returns a conservative fallback. Under calibrated world coverage, the probability of an unsafe certified commit is at most the target level α; with imperfect world proposal, the bound separates calibration and representation error. A dependency-free controlled simulator illustrates the safety-utility tradeoff and reproduces all reported results with one command. The goal is to offer a concrete approach for deciding not only what an agent should do, but when the available evidence is sufficient to safely do it.

Vision-language-action policies often fail under deployment-time distribution shifts such as clutter, distractor objects, lighting changes, novel objects, altered initial states, and reworded instructions. Hidden-state-based risk probes combined with functional conformal prediction can detect rollout failures, but their reliability depends on calibration data matching deployment conditions. We introduce SAFECAST, which leverages contrast set perturbations to improve hidden-state probe training and calibration for deployment time shift. SAFECAST statistically significantly improves failure detection ROC-AUC scores over a state of the art baseline in both real-world DROID and LIBERO simulation experiments across multiple VLM backbones. We further find that SAFECAST benefits most when both visual and language contrast set perturbations are used to augment data, and that with contrast set perturbations, sim-to-real calibration leads to better probes than using real rollout data only.

Large language model safeguards decide whether to answer before seeing how an answer will be used. This creates a basic problem for dual-use tasks: the same answer can help an authorized professional or an attacker, while an attacker can imitate a benign request and interaction history. We separate the capability released by the model from the evidence available about downstream use. When that evidence is copyable, we derive the exact worst-case floor on attacker assistance while preserving useful answers. The result yields a safety trilemma: Useful Capability, Reliable Safety, and Open Access cannot coexist. We then show how a trusted credential can complement existing safeguards by adding hard-to-copy information that predicts actual downstream use, and identify the stronger condition needed to eliminate the floor. Evidence from dual-use evaluations, adaptive attacks, and deployed trusted-access programs supports the practical relevance of these conditions.

Accurate cell segmentation and classification are foundational to digital pathology, enabling quantitative tissue analysis for diagnosis and treatment planning. Encoder-decoder architectures that fuse multi-scale features through skip connections have become the dominant paradigm for this task, yet standard direct skip connections treat every spatial location equally, which leads to redundant and potentially conflicting information reaching the decoder. To overcome this problem, various gating mechanisms have been introduced, but most of them operate solely on filtering encoder information, neglecting the benefit of global contextual information from the decoder. This study proposes replacing conventional skip connections in a CellViT-based model with a novel Spatial Attention Fusion (SAF) Gating module. Each SAF gate concatenates the encoder skip and upsampled decoder features, compresses them through two pointwise convolutions with an intermediate ReLU, and applies a channel-wise softmax to produce a per-pixel "heatmap of trust" that sums to unity at every spatial location, allowing the network to learn where each source is most trustworthy. The resulting fused features improve the model's ability to detect the minority "Dead" class, which in turn enhances the multi-class panoptic quality (mPQ) on the PanNuke dataset. SAF Gating is compared against six gating alternatives including no gating, attention gates, squeeze-and-excitation, CBAM, cross-attention, and attentional feature fusion on PanNuke and MoNuSeg datasets. SAF Gating achieves the highest mPQ (0.471), a gain driven primarily by a 14.5-point improvement in Dead-class F1 score compared to ungated CellViT baseline.

Reliable visual safety understanding in real-world scenarios demands more than just object recognition; it requires causal reasoning under epistemic uncertainty. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate impressive semantic alignment on standard benchmarks, they often struggle to distinguish between superficial correlation and genuine forensic logic when grounded in the dynamic, partially observable nature of first-person experiences. Existing evaluations, dominated by third-person surveillance footage and binary classification metrics, fail to expose this cognitive gap. To address this, we introduce EgoSafe-Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to probe forensic reasoning in egocentric safety scenarios. It comprises 12,000 unique evaluation samples, generated by pairing each of the 3,000 video clips with a QA chain governed by our proposed Hierarchical Reasoning Evaluation (HRE) protocol. Unlike standard benchmarks, HRE mandates a rigorous reasoning trajectory from initial feature anchoring to blind-spot deduction and intent inference, thereby enforcing logical consistency and penalizing shortcut-based predictions. Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LVLMs (e.g., Qwen3-VL, Gemini, VideoLLaMA 3) reveal a significant perception-reasoning decoupling: models often achieve high descriptive scores but exhibit notable fragility in causal reasoning and logical closure. Our work provides both a challenging dataset and a systematic evaluation framework to foster the development of logically robust video understanding systems.

Multi-agent systems improve capability through task decomposition and role specialization, but these same mechanisms introduce an important safety blind spot: a harmful objective can be fragmented into locally plausible subtasks, allowing malicious intent to evade detection by any single agent. This is a growing social-impact challenge: systems handling sensitive information or consequential tools can turn routine delegation into unauthorized disclosure or unsafe action. We argue that this failure mode is better understood as a semantic information-flow problem than as a single-turn prompt classification task. To address this, we propose SafeFlow, a defense framework for multi-agent systems that formalizes malicious cross-agent propagation as a semantic information-flow problem. SafeFlow attaches structured semantic taints to root requests, propagates them through a dynamic collaboration graph, and performs workflow-level validation to reconstruct the global risk context before irreversible actions are committed. Evaluated on four benchmarks spanning prompt injection, jailbreak-based unsafe tool use, risky code execution, and harmful web-agent behavior, SafeFlow reduces attack success rates compared to undefended baselines and external defenses while retaining high benign task completion and a high paired safe--harm success rate. Our findings show that multi-agent systems still lack mechanisms for preserving risk semantics across delegation boundaries. This gap can turn routine delegation into privacy harms or unsafe actions that affect people and organizations. SafeFlow keeps this risk visible throughout the workflow, before it results in harm.

Recent advances have introduced speech-to-speech (S2S) conversational assistants capable of producing natural-sounding interactions, including non-verbal cues like tonality and mood. In the automotive domain, this enables intuitive and humanlike in-car dialogue experiences. However, integrating these end-to-end assistants limits architectural options for programmable domain-specific safeguards. This paper discusses two implementation approaches for S2S guardrails: transcript-based and tool-based. Through an empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that both strategies are insufficient for industrial deployment in most cases due to prohibitive latency (delaying each answer by 0 to 1.4 seconds even for computationally cheap checks) and technical impediments (like potentially non-deterministic tool call behavior). Finally, we outline open challenges for S2S guardrails in the automotive context.

More than a million people in the UK suffer from frailty or dementia, which severely compromise their ability to travel in urban environments. This paper presents SafeStep, an AI-driven travel system that assists elderly users with their journeys. At the core of SafeStep is a novel travel graph representation, which integrates route planning with predictive modelling. For each stage of a journey, the system (i) generates personalized failure scenarios using a combi-nation of LLMs and the Anticip8 behavioral prediction engine, (ii) proposes targeted interventions, and (iii) estimates the impact of interventions on out-come probabilities. This enables SafeStep to select interventions that maximize the likelihood of the person reaching their destination. SafeStep was evaluated through experiments on travel graph generation and a field study involving 26 real-world journeys. Results showed that combining Anticip8 for failure pre-diction with GPT-based models for intervention evaluation yields the most re-liable performance. User feedback indicated that SafeStep improves confidence and perceived safety during travel, although interface usability needs to be im-proved for the target demographic. In the future, we would like to improve and release SafeStep. The AI system that was developed for SafeStep could be ap-plied in other areas, such as mental health, career coaching and addiction treatment.

VLMs are increasingly deployed in AD systems, creating an urgent need for rigorous safety evaluation under rare yet safety-critical scenarios. Among these, interactions with vulnerable road users represent a major source of real-world failures. However, existing safety-critical scenario generation methods predominantly rely on simulator-based pipelines, which suffer from a substantial sim-to-real gap and often fail to capture realistic, diverse, and unforeseen human-vehicle interaction dynamics. We present SafeGen, a goal-conditioned diffusion framework for safety-critical scenario generation in VLMADs. Our key insight is to formulate scenario generation as a goal-conditioned diffusion process, where a predefined catastrophic end-state serves as a strong supervisory signal, guiding the generation of temporally coherent video trajectories that naturally evolve toward safety-critical outcomes. Building on this formulation, we introduce Context Grounded End State Reasoning, which leverages VLMs to analyze benign driving contexts and infer latent vulnerabilities in human-vehicle interactions, producing structured end-state specifications that induce high-risk scenarios. Conditioned on these targets, we further propose End State Conditioned Video Evolution, which grounds semantic threats into physically plausible visual dynamics. Specifically, we instantiate high-risk agents within the scene via depth-aware geometric projection, followed by boundary-conditioned diffusion to generate intermediate frames with consistent motion patterns and temporal coherence. Extensive experiments across 3 VLMADs demonstrate that SafeGen increases the Judge Overall Score, a metric using a VLM judge to evaluate VLMADs' understanding and decision-making, by 24.25% on average compared to SoTA baselines. Furthermore, fine-tuning a VLMAD improves performance in real-world driving scenes by an average of 15.9%.

Safety alignment in large language models can be fragile under fine-tuning, as even benign task adaptation may increase harmful compliance. Existing defenses mainly follow two directions: they either intervene during or after fine-tuning through retraining or weight modification, which can be costly and may hurt task performance, or they use model-agnostic safety classifiers, which may miss failures specific to a given fine-tuned checkpoint. These limitations motivate a post hoc, model-specific, and non-invasive approach to safety restoration. To meet these requirements, we propose HyperSafe, a framework that restores safety behavior by generating a model-specific Safe Side Network (SSN) for each fine-tuned checkpoint. HyperSafe uses layer-wise activation fingerprints to capture how fine-tuning changes the model's inner representations. With a small set of given calibration prompts, the hypernetwork maps these fingerprints to the parameters of the \ssn{} in a single forward pass. The generated \ssn{} runs alongside the frozen fine-tuned model and performs prompt-level safety classification: harmful prompts are routed to refusal, while safe prompts are answered by the original fine-tuned model. Thus, HyperSafe requires no gradient updates, no safety data at deployment time, and no modification to the deployed model weights. We evaluate HyperSafe on two model families, Qwen2-7B and LLaMA-3-8B, across multiple safety benchmarks. HyperSafe reduces harmful response rates from 19-31% to below 1% on every held-out checkpoint, while keeping downstream task accuracy within 1% of the fine-tuned baseline on average. Code is available at https://github.com/nokronim/project-safety-remedy.

A key limitation on the use of diffusion models in robotic planning is their inability to inherently enforce safety or dynamical constraints, which often results in physically infeasible or unsafe outputs. Hybrid approaches that employ model predictive control (MPC) to address this problem can be unstable, as poor trajectory initializations from the diffusion model prevent the MPC from converging to a safe and feasible solution. To overcome these challenges, we propose D-SafeMPC, which enhances the interaction between diffusion and control. Our method guides the reverse diffusion process with control barrier functions (CBFs) and control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and employs an iterative-projection scheme where an MPC refines the trajectory at each denoising step. This steers sampling toward safe, goal-directed regions and provides reliable MPC warm starts. In simulations on a Franka manipulator across four scenarios (one static-obstacle and three dynamic-obstacle settings) and in a sim-to-real experiment on a physical Franka robot, D-SafeMPC improves safety, task success rates, and planning efficiency over state-of-the-art baselines. To facilitate reproducibility, our source code and experimental configurations are available in a repository at https://github.com/erdiphd/D-SafeMPC

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction (F3R) transformers have recently achieved remarkable success. However, scaling them to long image sequences remains challenging, as the quadratic complexity of cross-view global attention quickly becomes the dominant computational bottleneck. While recent efforts attempt to improve efficiency through compressed or sparse attention, they fail to fully exploit the inherent sparsity and dynamic behavior of global attention. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of global attention across multiple F3R transformers and reveal that attention patterns are highly heterogeneous, dynamic, and extremely sparse across layers and attention heads. Motivated by these findings, we propose SAF3R, a training-free dynamic sparse attention framework tailored to F3R transformers. SAF3R integrates tailored sparse attention mechanisms with offline head profiling and an efficient online adaptation strategy to match input-dependent attention behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAF3R achieves high sparsity ratios while preserving camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction quality, translating into substantial end-to-end speedup on F3R transformers compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jndeng/SAF3R

As video generation paradigms evolve from localized manipulation to full-scene synthesis, AI-generated video detection becomes increasingly challenging, as forgeries exhibit coherent global structure and high perceptual realism. However, existing benchmarks are biased toward perceptual fidelity and primarily evaluate detectors based on perceptual artifacts, providing limited coverage of scenarios that require reasoning about violations of physical laws, structural coherence, or social logic. This dataset bias shapes current approaches and results in a Perception-Reasoning Gap: artifact-centric models capture low-level statistical irregularities yet lack semantic inference, whereas vision-language models perform semantic reasoning but remain insensitive to fine-grained forensic cues. To bridge this gap, we propose SafeGuard, a multi-agent framework that enables collaborative specialization between forensic perception and semantic reasoning. A hierarchical perceptual solver extracts fine-grained forensic evidence, while a self-reflective verifier enforces consistency between semantic inference and physical plausibility, forming an interpretable evidence chain. To support evaluation, we introduce SafeVid, a novel AI-generated video detection benchmark comprising 20K videos spanning 10 social risk categories, designed to evaluate physical plausibility, structural consistency, and the rationality of social behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization of SafeGuard, improving accuracy on SafeVid by +18.7% and consistently outperforming prior methods across four public benchmarks.

Safe online reinforcement learning requires policies to respect safety constraints while maintaining smooth optimization dynamics. Existing approaches typically rely on either strict safety enforcement via action interventions, which introduce discontinuities in system interaction and learning, or soft safety constraint formulations, which preserve smooth learning but provide limited safety assurance. We propose AutoSafe, a safety-aware policy architecture that integrates structured safety monitoring and intervention directly into the action generation process. This design enables smooth, risk-dependent transitions between performance-driven and safety-preserving behaviors, resulting in continuous online interaction and learning dynamics. Empirical results across a suite of continuous-control benchmarks demonstrate strong safety enforcement without sacrificing learning smoothness. We further validate AutoSafe on a physical cart-pole system, highlighting its practical effectiveness for safe online learning in the real world.

Robots deployed in safety-critical environments must execute motions that are simultaneously robust to disturbances and provably safe from collisions. Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) offer inherent stability, temporal flexibility, and efficient trajectory generalization from single demonstrations, but they lack formal safety certificates. Conversely, Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability analysis provides a principled framework for computing worst-case safety margins and forward-invariant safe sets, but classical grid-based methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality and are impractical for real-time control. This paper introduces HJ-SafeDMP, a framework that integrates DMPs with learned HJ Reachability-based safety value functions to achieve provably safe, robust, and computationally efficient robot motion. We learn a Control Barrier Value Function (CBVF) from offline demonstration data using a model-free, finite-difference HJ recursion and deploy it as a real-time safety filter via a closed-form control law that modulates the DMP output. Unlike optimization-based CBF-QP approaches, our method achieves safety filtering without online quadratic program solves, preserving the computational efficiency of DMPs. We further incorporate an expectile-based offline learning objective that avoids querying out-of-distribution actions, and a conformal prediction calibration step that provides finite-sample probabilistic safety coverage. Experimental evaluation on a 7-DOF robot manipulator demonstrates that HJ-SafeDMP achieves formal safety guarantees with orders-of-magnitude faster execution than optimization-based baselines, while maintaining the robustness and adaptability of DMPs for human-robot interaction.

Ensuring safety of learning-enabled robotic manipulation across diverse embodiments and tasks still requires significant manual engineering. Existing approaches typically rely on heuristically designed fallback controllers or complex forward invariance assessments. These methods are often too conservative for task success, too computationally expensive for real-time execution, too heuristic to provide useful safety guarantees, or too engineering-heavy to transfer between setups. In this paper, we propose a universal safeguarding approach, X-Safe, which reasons directly in the robot's configuration space to provide formal probabilistic guarantees for collision avoidance. By operating in the configuration space, our method transfers across embodiments while relying solely on an object-based, quasi-static scene representation and a forward kinematics model of the robotic manipulator. Thus, X-Safe provides useful formal safety guarantees without requiring additional data, or engineering effort for different embodiments or scenes. We demonstrate X-Safe for diverse embodiments and policies, both in simulation and on hardware. We observe less degradation in task performance compared to state-of-the-art safeguarding, no collisions on hardware experiments, and empirically corroborate our formal guarantees.

Speculative inference accelerates large language model (LLM) decoding but provides no inherent safety guarantees. Existing safety defenses are largely incompatible with speculative inference: they either introduce additional computation or disrupt the draft-verify mechanism, negating acceleration benefits. This reveals a fundamental incompatibility between current safety methods and speculative decoding. We propose SafeSpec, a safety-aware speculative inference framework that integrates risk estimation directly into the verification process. SafeSpec attaches a lightweight latent safety head to the target model to jointly evaluate semantic validity and safety in a single forward pass. When unsafe generations are detected, SafeSpec applies rollback and safety-guided reflective multi-sampling to recover safe continuations rather than terminating generation. We model jailbreak attacks as distributional shifts over generative trajectories, where adversarial prompts increase the probability of harmful continuations without eliminating safe ones. Under this model, SafeSpec performs risk-aware trajectory recovery within the speculative decoding process. Across multiple models and adversarial benchmarks, SafeSpec achieves a substantially improved safety-efficiency trade-off. On Qwen3-32B, SafeSpec reduces attack success rates by 15% while preserving a 2.06x inference speedup on benign workloads, demonstrating that speculative acceleration and inference-time safety can be jointly optimized.

The Rapid Response (RR) framework, deployed in production systems, including Anthropic's ASL-3 safeguards, continuously improves jailbreak-detection classifiers. When new jailbreaks emerge that bypass these classifiers, Rapid Response generates synthetic variants for training, helping the model generalize from the new attacks and quickly adapt. We reveal that prompt injection can infiltrate this pipeline to deliver poisoned samples into the classifier's training set, enabling two attack objectives: (I) targeted poisoning attacks that create false positives on harmless samples by categorizing them as a jailbreak, with a specific desired feature (e.g., certain formatting, subject, or keyword), (II) concept-based backdoor attacks that induce false negatives on jailbreak inputs, generalizing even to jailbreaks from attack strategies the defender explicitly trained against, when the backdoor trigger is present. Importantly, our threat model restricts adversaries to modifying only jailbreak samples (not benign data or labels), a constraint unexplored by prior work that makes the second objective particularly challenging. We address this with Omission Attack, which exploits a new phenomenon: when training on concept-absent unsafe samples, the classifier misassociates that concept's presence with the safe label. Both attacks cause substantial and in some cases near-complete label flipping at only a 1% poisoning rate, achieving up to 100% false positive rates and up to 96% false negative rates.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to access organisational documentation, including standard operating procedures (SOPs), HR policies and institutional guidelines. However, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that rely on free-form rewriting can introduce hallucinations and unstable trade-offs between completeness and conciseness, particularly in safety- and compliance-critical settings. Objectives: To evaluate extraction as a hallucination-resistant alternative to rewriting-based RAG and compare strategies that balance precision, recall and safety across document types and model scales. Methods: We compare multiple prompting strategies, including line-number-based source selection, extraction of relevant guideline sentences with explicit safety annotations, and a multi-stage pipeline that refines draft answers using supporting evidence from source guidelines. Experiments are conducted on documents of varying length and structure, including local NHS acute care and oncology guidelines and UK-wide NICE guidelines, using both frontier-scale and locally deployable models. Performance is assessed using automatic metrics and human expert evaluation of relevance and completeness. Results: Line-number selection achieves the strongest results, outperforming direct copying and safety-focused strategies across both large and small models while maintaining high term recall (up to 95%) and close alignment with source text. Safety-oriented approaches improve precision but introduce systematic omissions, while multi-stage filtering further amplifies this trade-off. Performance varies with document structure: line-based extraction excels in protocol-like content, whereas alternative strategies perform better on more verbose documents (up to 97% term recall).

Large Language Models enable flexible natural-language planning but remain unreliable in determinism-critical domains due to their probabilistic nature. This limitation is especially problematic in running planning, where violating safety rules can lead to safety risks. We propose SafeRun, a framework for deterministic LLM-based planning via a decoupled architecture. SafeRun separates soft interpretation by an LLM from hard constraint enforcement by a deterministic solver, ensuring strict safety constraints while preserving natural-language flexibility. To validate SafeRun, we build a comprehensive benchmark for running planning under realistic physiological and safety constraints. Experiments across five LLMs show that SafeRun achieves 100% safety score (vs.\ 79.1% PE average and 97.6% CodeAct average) while maintaining competitive instruction-following scores. The SafeRun benchmark is publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/zzp-seeker/SafeRun-RunPlanning-Benchmark}{huggingface}.

The rapid advancement of generative models has blurred the boundary between synthetic and real imagery, creating an urgent need for reliable deepfake detection. Yet most existing approaches rely on massive real--fake datasets, which are increasingly difficult to maintain as new generators continue to emerge. In this work, we investigate how much information about image authenticity is already encoded in modern multimodal vision representations. We find that frozen multimodal encoders naturally separate real and synthetic images in their embedding space, enabling a simple linear classifier to achieve strong performance without task-specific fine-tuning. Motivated by this observation, we develop a representation-aware data curation strategy that selects a compact set of representative generators for training. The resulting training set contains only 10K images, compared to 288K in AIGIBench and 4M in OpenFake, while improving robustness to unseen generators and distribution shifts. We additionally introduce RealWorldBench, a benchmark consisting of modern camera photographs, contemporary stock images, and outputs from recent commercial generators. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that combining frozen multimodal representations with carefully curated training data provides a simple and effective approach to AI-generated image detection.

Open-weight LLMs are increasingly fine-tuned into customized assistants, but downstream fine-tuning can weaken safety alignment and make models more vulnerable to malicious prompts, even when the training data is not intentionally harmful. This creates a recurring safety recovery problem as target models are repeatedly updated with new task data or user interactions. We propose SafeGene, a reusable safety-adapter module designed for cross-task reuse within each architecture-compatible model family. Rather than treating safety recovery as a model-specific repair step, SafeGene treats safety capability as an independent, reusable adapter representation decoupled from task-specific updates. This representation is obtained from aligned--degraded model discrepancies, refined into task-transferable safety vectors through data-aware layer selection, and expressed in each downstream task-adapted model via few-shot layer-wise coefficient recalibration. Experiments across multiple model families, downstream tasks, and safety judges show that SafeGene-enhanced models reduce harmful response rates while maintaining downstream performance, outperforming representative safe adaptation methods in safety--utility trade-off.

Financial decision-making tasks such as stock recommendation and portfolio allocation typically estimate future return and risk and then select trades or allocations for an investor, and the chosen optimization objective often determines realized performance. However, because market conditions evolve over time, a fixed objective can be suboptimal across regimes, while regime-switching pipelines that rely on latent regime estimates can be noisy or delayed and frequent switching can increase turnover and operational instability. In this paper, we propose DOSS (Dynamic Objective Selection with Safeguards), a learning-based selector that directly chooses the decision-relevant objective function at each time point from interpretable statistical summaries of recent returns, selecting among a small set of candidates (e.g., return-seeking, loss-averse, and risk-adjusted) without introducing intermediate regime variables. DOSS formulates objective selection as a classification problem over objectives and performs sequential updates with a rolling window to make forward-looking selections without temporal leakage, while also outputting a confidence score for each proposal. To mitigate misselection and excessive switching in deployment, DOSS applies confidence-aware gating with a fail-safe that overrides low-confidence proposals to a conservative default and enforces explicit controls tied to switching frequency. We further integrate governance by positioning a Large Language Model (LLM) as an oversight component rather than a generator of new objectives: the LLM is restricted to accept a proposed objective or override it to a predefined safe default, with deterministic rule-based constraints triggering overrides when needed.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values often degrades their general capabilities, termed the alignment tax. Existing methods mitigate this by balancing dual objectives, which heavily rely on massive general-purpose data or auxiliary reward models. In this paper, we argue that, because safety features are inherently sparse within the output distribution, alignment requires localized modifications rather than global trade-offs. To this end, we propose SafeSteer, which performs on-policy distillation confined to safety tokens. First, we construct a safety teacher via activation steering. Based on this teacher, we develop a safety token selection algorithm. Consequently, SafeSteer restricts the reverse KL penalty to these tokens during training to preserve general capabilities. Experimental results across diverse models show that our SafeSteer achieves a superior trade-off between safety and general capability compared with existing methods, attaining strong safety performance on seven safety benchmarks with only minimal degradation on five general capability benchmarks. Notably, SafeSteer requires only 100 harmful samples without using any general-purpose data, less than 1% of what previous baselines used, considerably reducing alignment cost. More details are on our project page at https://anjingkun.github.io/SafeSteer.

Large language models increasingly stream long, reasoning-intensive responses in real time, making when to moderate as critical as whether to moderate. Existing guardrails fall into two unsatisfactory extremes: response-level methods delay intervention until the full output is generated, whereas token-level methods act on incomplete semantics, often producing unstable decisions and excessive guard invocations. To address this challenge, we propose SentGuard, a sentence-level streaming guardrail that operates in parallel with generation. A lightweight waiting buffer groups streamed tokens into sentence chunks and releases only verified chunks to the user, introducing a small offset that enables SentGuard to assess the current prefix while the target LLM decodes subsequent content. To support this, we construct StreamSafe, a benchmark with structured per-sentence annotations across 8 harm categories, capturing the evolution of safety risks across both reasoning and response segments. We further train SentGuard with a coarse-to-fine objective to detect unsafe intent as soon as it emerges at sentence boundaries. Experiments on 5 safety benchmarks show that SentGuard outperforms existing baselines, detecting 90.5% of unsafe cases within two sentences while maintaining a low streaming false-positive rate of 7.41%.

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly leverage the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to operate in complex environments, the expansion of their action spaces offers agents unsafe capabilities and underscores the risk of power-seeking. While broad action space and greater environment influence are essential for task fulfillment, they create a fragile risk surface where minor errors or hallucinations are magnified into catastrophic failures. In response, we propose SafeMCP, a {server-side} defense plugin that constrains tool acquisition via predictive reasoning regarding future safety risks. SafeMCP utilizes an internal world model for look-ahead reasoning to implement a two-tier defense: proactive tool filtering to constrain hazardous power expansion and immediate intervention as a fail-safe. To train SafeMCP, we introduce a three-stage pipeline comprising environmental dynamic grounding, safe policy initialization, and reinforcement learning (RL) with dual verifiable rewards. Experiments on PowerSeeking Bench, ToolEmu, and AgentHarm show that SafeMCP achieves a safe equilibrium, effectively mitigating risks while preserving agent utility.

The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings. Prior work has identified test-time contextual cues, such as hypothetical scenarios, as a source of verbalized evaluation awareness and subsequent behavioral shift. In this paper, we investigate a potential explanation of this phenomenon: evaluation meta-knowledge, defined as parametric knowledge about the structural traits that characterize evaluations. Similar to dataset contamination, where benchmark exposure leads to higher performance through memorization, we hypothesize that models trained on texts describing evaluation practices may implicitly learn to recognize and respond to evaluation-like contexts, for instance, through exposure to scientific articles or social media posts about AI benchmarking. To test this, we fine-tune models on synthetic documents describing evaluation traits such as verifiable structures or harmful requests. Evaluating this fine-tuned model on five safety benchmarks, we find that it is significantly safer than the base model and control model. This behavioral shift persists even when restricting the analysis to responses lacking explicit verbalization of evaluation awareness. Our results demonstrate that evaluation meta-knowledge may inflate safety benchmark performance, introducing a novel confounder that is independent of explicit memorization or verbalized evaluation awareness, thus, challenging to detect. These findings have important implications for the design and interpretation of AI safety evaluations. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/compass-group-tue/arxiv2026_evaluation_meta_knowledge.

Large language models(LLMs) increasingly match expert performance on licensing examinations, yet routine clinical use remains limited because governance requires auditable reasoning, safety and ethics alignment, and resilience to adversarial misuse. Here we present SafeMed-R1, trained with a traceable Clinical Trust Signals(CTS) pipeline that links each reasoning instance to clinician rubric scores and edit histories, and aligned through safety and ethics supervision and red team stress testing. SafeMed-R1 attains a macro-averaged accuracy of 79.6% across clinical benchmarks. Under adversarial safety testing, it shows the lowest aggregated risk and reduces unsafe outputs by about 3 to 5% relative to its baseline. In a paired expert study of 30 medication safety vignettes, SafeMed-R1 matches PGY1 and PGY2 residents on medical correctness and scores higher for medication safety, guideline consistency, and clinical usefulness. Collectively, these results suggest that clinician-audited supervision provenance, together with domain-tailored safety and ethics alignment, can strengthen governance-relevant evidence without relying on inference-time retrieval or citation grounding.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exacerbate safety risks by introducing vulnerabilities across multiple modalities, such as language and vision. Current MLLM safety evaluation tools, however, suffer from major limitations: 1) English-centric dataset construction, and 2) a focus on generic risks that are not tied to local cultural contexts. This paper introduces KSAFE-MM, a benchmark for Korean multimodal safety evaluation that covers both general safety risks and culture-specific vulnerabilities. KSAFE-MM consists of two parts, KSAFE-MM-G and KSAFE-MM-C. KSAFE-MM-G evaluates globally shared risks in Korean contexts through linguistic contextualization, which transforms generic safety queries into contextually grounded multimodal samples. KSAFE-MM-C targets culture-dependent MLLM safety vulnerabilities using localized visual queries derived from real-world contexts. It pairs these visual queries with jailbreak-style textual queries to cover multimodal safety risks involving cultural visual cues and malicious textual intent. Together, these components provide a general-to-local construction pipeline for evaluating both globally shared safety risks and culture-specific vulnerabilities. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art MLLMs on KSAFE-MM and reveal that models exhibit greater vulnerability to culturally grounded attacks than to generic ones. Notably, jailbreaking strategies substantially amplify attack success rates, with ProgramExecution yielding up to 74.2% ASR compared to 13.4% for standard queries. Furthermore, we identify a systematic trade-off between safety and over-refusal, where models achieving low ASR tend to exhibit excessive refusal behavior on benign queries. These findings highlight the urgent need for culturally grounded safety evaluation beyond English-centric benchmarks.

Proprietary large language models (LLMs) face risks of intellectual property (IP) violation, as adversaries can replicate an LLM by collecting input-output pairs to train a surrogate model, causing financial setbacks. Watermarks offer a promising defense to verify ownership, but existing methods often struggle with semantic distortion, factual inconsistency, and adversarial attacks. In addition, key-conditioned watermarks for provider-specific detection, especially in cross-provider and multi-user scenarios, remain largely underexplored. To address these challenges, we propose SAFESEAL, a novel key-conditioned watermarking framework that achieves strong detectability with minimal impact on model utility, effectively balancing detectability, utility, and robustness. SAFESEAL preserves named entities while substituting linguistic terms with context-aware synonyms through a key-conditioned Tournament sampling mechanism, maintaining semantic fidelity and factual consistency. For detection, we introduce a key-conditioned contrastive detector that jointly encodes the text and key, enabling provider-specific and robust watermark verification. We derive theoretical bounds on the utility-detectability trade-off and significantly reduce latency through lightweight models, batching, and parallelism. Extensive experiments show that SAFESEAL outperforms baselines in utility, detectability, and robustness, achieving a BERTScore of 0.983, entity similarity of 0.963, a 98.2% detection rate, and the highest human ratings for text quality and content preservation, with latency comparable to the fastest baseline. To promote transparency and community-driven progress, we release the first public watermark leaderboard and an interactive demo.

Mobile app marketplaces require developers to disclose standardized content rating descriptors (CRDs) to inform users about potentially sensitive or restricted content. Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of these disclosures remains challenging due to the multimodal nature of app content, which spans textual descriptions and visual interfaces. In this paper, we present QwenSafe, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) designed to automatically identify the presence of Apple-defined CRDs by jointly reasoning over app metadata and screenshots. To enable scalable training for this task, we introduce metadata2CRD, a data-construction pipeline that synthesizes descriptor-aligned question-answer pairs by combining app descriptions, screenshots, and formal descriptor definitions. We adapt Qwen3-VL-8B using supervised fine-tuning followed by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align model predictions with descriptor-specific evidence and explanations across visual and textual modalities. We evaluate QwenSafe on 12 Apple-defined content rating descriptors and compare it against state-of-the-art vision-language models, including Qwen3-VL, LLaVA-1.6, and Gemini-2.5-Flash. QwenSafe consistently outperforms all baselines in binary CRD classification, achieving improvements in positive-class recall of 111.8%, 36.1%, and 2.1%, respectively. Our results demonstrate that descriptor-aware multimodal alignment substantially improves automated content classification and highlights the potential of vision-language models to support scalable and consistent content rating in mobile app marketplaces.

This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored question: can watermarked images remain editable without compromising watermark integrity? We propose SafeMark, a framework for watermark-preserving text-guided image manipulation that explicitly integrates watermark integrity into the editing process. Specifically, SafeMark adds a thresholded watermark-decoding loss directly to the diffusion editor's training objective, fine-tuning the editor so that semantically valid edits also preserve the embedded watermark at the final output. This design admits a clean information-theoretic justification: maintaining high bit-accuracy on the edited image lower-bounds the mutual information that the editor channel preserves between watermark and edited output, the quantity that fundamentally controls watermark recoverability. SafeMark is compatible with differentiable diffusion-based editors, and requires no architectural modification. Extensive evaluations across multiple datasets, text-guided editing methods, and post-edit distortion settings demonstrate that SafeMark achieves high watermark bit accuracy across diverse editing settings while maintaining high-quality semantic edits, without sacrificing robustness to common post-edit distortions. These results demonstrate that semantic editability and watermark integrity are fundamentally compatible, enabling trustworthy image provenance in generative editing pipelines.

Large Language Model (LLM) alignment remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that elicit unsafe responses, motivating pre-model and post-model guards. Pre-model guards audit the safety of prompts before invoking target models. However, relying solely on the prompt often leads to high false-negative rates (i.e., jailbreak attacks go undetected). Post-model guards address this issue by auditing both the user prompt and the target model's response. However, they incur a high computational cost, including increased token usage and processing time, because they operate after target model inference. In this paper, we introduce a safeguard design that leverages the transferability of jailbreak attacks to enforce prompt safety before target model inference. We first conduct a systematic study of jailbreak transferability, particularly from LLMs to small language models (SLMs). Through these experiments, we identify key factors influencing transferability. Building on these insights, we observe that responses from smaller draft models reflect the safety implications of those from large target models; \ie given a jailbreak prompt constructed for an LLM, an SLM is likely to be triggered to generate an unaligned response. Based on this observation, our safeguard design leverages speculative inference with SLMs to generate a set of draft responses. It then feeds the original prompt and these drafts into existing guards to predict their safety. We demonstrate that this design reduces the false-negative rate of pre-model guards and offers a low \Efficiency alternative to post-model guards. \textcolor{red}{\bf Notice: This paper contains examples of harmful language.}

The rapid growth of online video platforms and AI-generated content has made reliable video guardrails a key challenge for safety and real-world deployment. While most videos can be screened through fast pattern recognition, a small subset requires deeper reasoning over temporally complex content and nuanced policy constraints. Existing approaches typically rely on large vision-language models applied uniformly across all inputs, resulting in high inference costs and inefficient allocation of computation. We propose SafeLens, a video guardrail framework that introduces a fast-and-slow inference architecture for efficient and accurate content moderation with variable computational cost across inputs. Additionally, we construct a high-quality dataset by applying influence-guided filtering to the SafeWatch Dataset, retaining only 2.4% of the original data. To further address limitations of training-time scaling, we enable test-time reasoning by augmenting the filtered data with structured Chain-of-Thought traces. Across real-world and AI-generated video benchmarks, SafeLens achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong open-source video guardrails (e.g., SafeWatch-8B, OmniGuard-7B) and closed-source models (e.g., GPT-5.4, Gemini-3.1-pro) while significantly reducing inference cost, demonstrating that efficient design serves to be more effective than scaling data or model size alone.

Urgently needed generalizable robot object interaction and manipulation requires high-quality Cross-Category object perception. As a pioneer of this area, Generalizable and Actionable Parts (GAParts) understanding has attracted increasing attention from relevant researchers. However, most recent works either have insufficient design regarding the symmetry issue or require rich symmetry annotation, which severely impedes precise GAPart pose estimation in data-lacking scenarios. In this paper, we propose SAFAG, a novel Symmetry Annotation-Free framework for Generalizable and Actionable Parts Pose Estimation. Specifically, we suggest a stepwise refinement two-stage framework for candidate-to-final quaternion regression, and tackle the symmetry prediction as a probability distribution problem with self-supervised learning strategy. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance and robustness of our SAFAG. We believe that our work has the enormous potential to be applied in many areas of embodied AI system.

Recent advances in 3D generative editing, particularly pipelines based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-fidelity, multi-view-consistent scene manipulation from text prompts. However, we find that these pipelines also introduce new safety risks when unsafe prompts produce edits that are propagated and optimized across views. In this work, we study unsafe generation in 3D editing pipelines and show that such behavior can lead to coherent, undesirable Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content in the final 3D representation. To address this, we propose 3DEditSafe, a safety-regularized 3D editing framework that constrains unsafe semantic propagation during optimization. 3DEditSafe combines generation-stage safety guidance with rendered-view 3D safety regularization, safe semantic projection, residue suppression, and mask-aware preservation to steer optimization away from unsafe editing directions. We evaluate our approach on EditSplat scenes using an object-compatible unsafe prompt benchmark and show that 2D safety guidance alone is not consistently sufficient to prevent unsafe 3D edits. 3DEditSafe reduces unsafe semantic alignment and view-level attack success rates, while revealing a safety-quality tradeoff in which stronger unsafe suppression can introduce artifacts or reduce unsafe-prompt fidelity. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to study and defend against unsafe generation in text-driven 3D editing pipelines, highlighting the need for safety mechanisms that operate directly on optimized 3D representations.

Continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) updates a pretrained model online on an unlabeled, non-stationary stream while anchoring it to a frozen source checkpoint. This anchor is useful only when the source remains reliable. On CCC-Hard, however, a ResNet-50 source falls to approximately $1.3\%$ top-$1$ accuracy, while existing source-anchored CTTA methods continue applying the same anchor strength. We call this failure mode blind anchoring and propose RMemSafe, a reliability-gated extension of ROID that uses the frozen source's normalized predictive entropy to attenuate all explicit source-coupled uses in the objective. When the source posterior approaches uniformity, the gate closes: the source anchor and agreement filter vanish, and the objective reduces to a source-agnostic fallback comprising ROID's base losses plus marginal calibration. Combined with ASR, RMemSafe achieves the lowest error on $8$ of $9$ matched-split continual-corruption cells and is the best reset-based method on all $9$, improving ROID+ASR by $1.05$~pp on ResNet-50 and $0.48$~pp on ViT-B/16. A controlled source-degradation sweep shows a $1.13{\times}$ shallower harm slope than ROID+ASR, consistent with the graceful-decay prediction. The entropy gate detects high-entropy source collapse, not confidently wrong low-entropy sources; this scope is explicitly evaluated and discussed.

Robotic manipulation is typically evaluated by task success, but successful completion does not guarantee safe execution. Many safety failures are temporal: a robot may touch a clean surface after contamination or release an object before it is fully inside an enclosure. We introduce SafeManip, a property-driven benchmark to explicitly evaluate temporal safety properties in robotic manipulation, moving beyond prior evaluations that largely focus on task completion or per-state constraint violations. SafeManip defines reusable safety templates over finite executions using Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces (LTLf). It maps observed rollouts to symbolic predicate traces and evaluates them with LTLf-based monitors. Its property suite covers eight manipulation safety categories: collision and contact safety, grasp stability, release stability, cross-contamination, action onset, mechanism recovery, object containment, and enclosure access. Templates can be instantiated with task-specific objects, fixtures, regions, or skills, allowing the same safety specifications to generalize across tasks and environments. We evaluate SafeManip on six vision-language-action policies, including $π_0$, $π_{0.5}$, GR00T, and their training variants, across 50 RoboCasa365 household tasks. Results show that even strong models often behave unsafely. Task-success gains do not reliably translate into safer execution: many successful rollouts remain unsafe, while longer-horizon or more complex tasks expose more violations. SafeManip provides a reusable evaluation layer for diagnosing temporal safety failures and measuring safe success beyond task completion.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing attention. Due to the heterogeneity of their input features, they face significant challenges in terms of jailbreak defenses. Current defense methods rely on costly fine-tuning or inefficient post-hoc interventions, limiting their ability to address novel attacks and involving performance trade-offs. To address the above issues, we explore the inherent safety capabilities within MLLMs and quantify their intrinsic ability to discern harmfulness at decoding stage. We observe that 1) MLLMs can distinguish the harmful and harmless inputs during decoding process, 2) Image-based attacks are more stealthy. Based on these insights, we introduce SafeSteer, a decoding-level defense mechanism for MLLMs. Specifically, it includes a Decoding-Probe, a lightweight probe for detecting and correcting harmful output during decoding, which iteratively steers the decoding process toward safety. Furthermore, a modal semantic alignment vector is integrated to transfer the strong textual safety alignment to the vision modality. Experiments on multiple MLLMs demonstrate that SafeSterr can improve MLLMs' safety by up to 33.40% without fine-tuning. Notably, it can maintain the effectiveness of MLLMs, ensuring a balance between their helpfulness and harmlessness.

This paper proposes a jailbreaking prompt detection method for large language models (LLMs) to defend against jailbreak attacks. Although recent LLMs are equipped with built-in safeguards, it remains possible to craft jailbreaking prompts that bypass them. We argue that such jailbreaking prompts are inherently fragile, and thus introduce an embedding disruption method to re-activate the safeguards within LLMs. Unlike previous defense methods that aim to serve as standalone solutions, our approach instead cooperates with the LLM's internal defense mechanisms by re-triggering them. Moreover, through extensive analysis, we gain a comprehensive understanding of the disruption effects and develop an efficient search algorithm to identify appropriate disruptions for effective jailbreak detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively defends against state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks in white-box and black-box settings, and remains robust even against adaptive attacks.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into academic peer review, their vulnerability to adversarial hidden prompts, i.e., adversarial instructions embedded in submissions to manipulate outcomes, poses a critical threat to scholarly integrity. We propose SafeReview, a co-evolutionary adversarial training framework for defending LLM-based peer review systems against such attacks. SafeReview jointly trains a Generator model to create sophisticated attack prompts and a Defender model to preserve review integrity under adversarial manipulation. The Generator is optimized to produce increasingly effective prompt injections, while the Defender is strengthened through preference-based training to maintain consistent reviews between clean and attacked submissions. Experimental results show that SafeReview improves robustness against adaptive prompt injection attacks, better preserves paper ranking under attack, and generalizes across attacker architectures compared with static defenses. These results demonstrate the potential of co-evolutionary training as a foundation for securing LLM-assisted peer review.

Falls among older adults are a significant public health concern, leading to severe injuries, loss of independence, and increased healthcare costs. This study evaluates the effectiveness of various models, including a Geometric approach, XGBoost, SVM, and several deep learning architectures, in classifying walker usage, standing vs. sitting, and posture for smart walkers used. Geometric and XGBoost were the top performers. XGBoost achieved near-perfect training accuracy in binary classification tasks, with 99.84% for walker choice and 99.69% for standing vs. sitting. For posture classification, Geometric approach attained 89.9% accuracy for 8 postures, and XGBoost obtained 99.24% during training for 17 postures. Deep learning models such as the 4-layer CNN and Encoder-Decoder CNN also demonstrated strong performance in binary classification, with accuracies above 98%. This study underscores the potential of machine learning to enhance human-robot interaction in smart walkers, particularly for fall prevention.

Internal Safety Collapse (ISC) is a failure mode in which frontier LLMs, when executing legitimate professional tasks whose correct completion structurally requires harmful content, spontaneously generate that content with safety failure rates exceeding 95%. Existing input-level defenses achieve a 100% failure rate against ISC, and standard system prompt defenses provide only partial mitigation. We propose SafeRedirect, a system-level override that defeats ISC by redirecting the model's task-completion drive rather than suppressing it. SafeRedirect grants explicit permission to fail the task, prescribes a deterministic hard-stop output, and instructs the model to preserve harmful placeholders unresolved. Evaluated on seven frontier LLMs across three AI/ML-related ISC task types in the single-turn setting, SafeRedirect reduces average unsafe generation rates from 71.2% to 8.0%, compared to 55.0% for the strongest viable baseline. Multi-model ablation reveals that failure permission and condition specificity are universally critical, while the importance of other components varies across models. Cross-attack evaluation confirms state-of-the-art defense against ISC with generalization performance at least on par with the baseline on other attack families. Code is available at https://github.com/fzjcdt/SafeRedirect.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as scalable tools for mental health counseling, yet evaluating their safety remains challenging due to the interactional and context-dependent nature of clinical harm. Existing evaluation frameworks predominantly assess isolated responses using coarse-grained taxonomies or static datasets, limiting their ability to diagnose how harms emerge and accumulate over multi-turn counseling interactions. In this work, we introduce R-MHSafe, a role-aware mental health safety taxonomy that characterizes clinically significant harm in terms of the interactional roles an AI counselor adopts, including perpetrator, instigator, facilitator, or enabler, combined with clinically grounded harm categories. Then, we propose MHSafeEval, a closed-loop, agent-based evaluation framework that formulates safety assessment as trajectory-level discovery of harm through adversarial multi-turn interactions, guided by role-aware modeling. Using R-MHSafe and MHSafeEval, we conduct a large-scale evaluation across state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results reveal substantial role-dependent and cumulative safety failures that are systematically missed by existing static benchmarks, and show that our framework significantly improves failure-mode coverage and diagnostic granularity.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, yet a unified treatment of their overlapping safety challenges remains lacking. We present SafeLM, a framework that jointly addresses four pillars of LLM safety: privacy, security, misinformation, and adversarial robustness. SafeLM combines federated training with gradient smartification and Paillier encryption for privacy, integrates defenses against training and inference-time attacks, employs contrastive grounding with calibrated decoding to reduce hallucinations, and introduces alignment-aware binarized aggregation to enhance robustness while maintaining bounded reconstruction quality. Across benchmarks on factuality, toxicity, and membership inference, SafeLM achieves 98.0% harmful content detection accuracy, reduces communication by 96.9%, and lowers gradient inversion PSNR from 31.7 dB to 15.1 dB. Ablations show that each component contributes independently, whereas their integration yields a strong privacy utility efficiency trade-off for deploying trustworthy LLMs.

Machine learning models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, but even aligned models such as Mistral and LLaVA still exhibit unsafe behaviors inherited from pre-training. Current alignment methods like SFT and RLHF primarily encourage models to generate preferred responses, but do not explicitly remove the unsafe subnetworks that trigger harmful outputs. In this work, we introduce a resource-efficient pruning framework that directly identifies and removes parameters associated with unsafe behaviors while preserving model utility. Our method employs a gradient-free attribution mechanism, requiring only modest GPU resources, and generalizes across architectures and quantized variants. Empirical evaluations on ML models show substantial reductions in unsafe generations and improved robustness against jailbreak attacks, with minimal utility loss. From the perspective of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, our results suggest that ML models contain "unsafe tickets" responsible for harmful behaviors, and pruning reveals "safety tickets" that maintain performance while aligning outputs. This provides a lightweight, post-hoc alignment strategy suitable for deployment in resource-constrained settings.

Recent research points toward LLMs being manipulated through adversarial and seemingly benign inputs, resulting in harmful, biased, or policy-violating outputs. In this paper, we study an underexplored issue concerning harmful and toxic mathematical word problems. We show that math questions, particularly those framed as natural language narratives, can serve as a subtle medium for propagating biased, unethical, or psychologically harmful content, with heightened risks in educational settings involving children. To support a systematic study of this phenomenon, we introduce ToxicGSM, a dataset of 1.9k arithmetic problems in which harmful or sensitive context is embedded while preserving mathematically well-defined reasoning tasks. Using this dataset, we audit the behaviour of existing LLMs and analyse the trade-offs between safety enforcement and mathematical correctness. We further propose SafeMath -- a safety alignment technique that reduces harmful outputs while maintaining, and in some cases improving, mathematical reasoning performance. Our results highlight the importance of disentangling linguistic harm from math reasoning and demonstrate that effective safety alignment need not come at the cost of accuracy.

Recent advances in real-time interactive text-driven motion generation have enabled humanoids to perform diverse behaviors. However, kinematics-only generators often exhibit physical hallucinations, producing motion trajectories that are physically infeasible to track with a downstream motion tracking controller or unsafe for real-world deployment. These failures often arise from the lack of explicit physics-aware objectives for real-robot execution and become more severe under out-of-distribution (OOD) user inputs. Hence, we propose SafeFlow, a text-driven humanoid whole-body control framework that combines physics-guided motion generation with a 3-Stage Safety Gate driven by explicit risk indicators. SafeFlow adopts a two-level architecture. At the high level, we generate motion trajectories using Physics-Guided Rectified Flow Matching in a VAE latent space to improve real-robot executability, and further accelerate sampling via Reflow to reduce the number of function evaluations (NFE) for real-time control. The 3-Stage Safety Gate enables selective execution by detecting semantic OOD prompts using a Mahalanobis score in text-embedding space, filtering unstable generations via a directional sensitivity discrepancy metric, and enforcing final hard kinematic constraints such as joint and velocity limits before passing the generated trajectory to a low-level motion tracking controller. Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 demonstrate that SafeFlow outperforms diffusion- and retargeting-based baselines in success rate, physical compliance, and inference speed while preserving motion diversity, with consistent gains across three downstream tracking controllers.

Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide a principled framework for safety-critical control, but their construction typically requires an explicit and differentiable description of the safe or unsafe region. It becomes challenging for data-defined unsafe regions that may evolve over time. This paper proposes SafeLink, a data-driven CBF construction and adaptation method based on a cost-sensitive random vector functional link (RVFL) network. SafeLink introduces asymmetric misclassification costs to promote conservative unsafe-region representation while preserving a closed-form solution. We establish the Lipschitz continuity of the learned CBF and its derivatives, and derive sufficient conditions for conservative unsafe-region coverage and the corresponding interval-wise safety guarantees. Analytical updates are further developed for adjusting the misclassification cost and for incrementally adding or decrementally removing samples, avoiding full retraining when the unsafe region changes. Experiments on a two-link manipulator demonstrate that SafeLink rapidly adapts to evolving unsafe regions, enables collision-free target reaching, and achieves substantially lower update runtimes than baselines.