SafeMind: Benchmarking and Mitigating Safety Risks in Embodied LLM Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chen, Ruolin, Sun, Yinqian, Wang, Jihang, Lv, Mingyang, Zhang, Qian, Zeng, Yi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Chen, Ruolin
Sun, Yinqian
Wang, Jihang
Lv, Mingyang
Zhang, Qian
Zeng, Yi
author_facet Chen, Ruolin
Sun, Yinqian
Wang, Jihang
Lv, Mingyang
Zhang, Qian
Zeng, Yi
contents Embodied agents powered by large language models (LLMs) inherit advanced planning capabilities; however, their direct interaction with the physical world exposes them to safety vulnerabilities. In this work, we identify four key reasoning stages where hazards may arise: Task Understanding, Environment Perception, High-Level Plan Generation, and Low-Level Action Generation. We further formalize three orthogonal safety constraint types (Factual, Causal, and Temporal) to systematically characterize potential safety violations. Building on this risk model, we present SafeMindBench, a multimodal benchmark with 5,558 samples spanning four task categories (Instr-Risk, Env-Risk, Order-Fix, Req-Align) across high-risk scenarios such as sabotage, harm, privacy, and illegal behavior. Extensive experiments on SafeMindBench reveal that leading LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) and widely used embodied agents remain susceptible to safety-critical failures. To address this challenge, we introduce SafeMindAgent, a modular Planner-Executor architecture integrated with three cascaded safety modules, which incorporate safety constraints into the reasoning process. Results show that SafeMindAgent significantly improves safety rate over strong baselines while maintaining comparable task completion. Together, SafeMindBench and SafeMindAgent provide both a rigorous evaluation suite and a practical solution that advance the systematic study and mitigation of safety risks in embodied LLM agents.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SafeMind: Benchmarking and Mitigating Safety Risks in Embodied LLM Agents
Chen, Ruolin
Sun, Yinqian
Wang, Jihang
Lv, Mingyang
Zhang, Qian
Zeng, Yi
Artificial Intelligence
Embodied agents powered by large language models (LLMs) inherit advanced planning capabilities; however, their direct interaction with the physical world exposes them to safety vulnerabilities. In this work, we identify four key reasoning stages where hazards may arise: Task Understanding, Environment Perception, High-Level Plan Generation, and Low-Level Action Generation. We further formalize three orthogonal safety constraint types (Factual, Causal, and Temporal) to systematically characterize potential safety violations. Building on this risk model, we present SafeMindBench, a multimodal benchmark with 5,558 samples spanning four task categories (Instr-Risk, Env-Risk, Order-Fix, Req-Align) across high-risk scenarios such as sabotage, harm, privacy, and illegal behavior. Extensive experiments on SafeMindBench reveal that leading LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) and widely used embodied agents remain susceptible to safety-critical failures. To address this challenge, we introduce SafeMindAgent, a modular Planner-Executor architecture integrated with three cascaded safety modules, which incorporate safety constraints into the reasoning process. Results show that SafeMindAgent significantly improves safety rate over strong baselines while maintaining comparable task completion. Together, SafeMindBench and SafeMindAgent provide both a rigorous evaluation suite and a practical solution that advance the systematic study and mitigation of safety risks in embodied LLM agents.
title SafeMind: Benchmarking and Mitigating Safety Risks in Embodied LLM Agents
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25885