Cooking Up Risks: Benchmarking and Reducing Food Safety Risks in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Luo, Weidi, Wen, Xiaofei, Huang, Tenghao, Wang, Hongyi, Xiang, Zhen, Xiao, Chaowei, Gligorić, Kristina, Chen, Muhao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Luo, Weidi
Wen, Xiaofei
Huang, Tenghao
Wang, Hongyi
Xiang, Zhen
Xiao, Chaowei
Gligorić, Kristina
Chen, Muhao
author_facet Luo, Weidi
Wen, Xiaofei
Huang, Tenghao
Wang, Hongyi
Xiang, Zhen
Xiao, Chaowei
Gligorić, Kristina
Chen, Muhao
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for everyday tasks, including food preparation and health-related guidance. However, food safety remains a high-stakes domain where inaccurate or misleading information can cause severe real-world harm. Despite these risks, current LLMs and safety guardrails lack rigorous alignment tailored to domain-specific food hazards. To address this gap, we introduce FoodGuardBench, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 3,339 queries grounded in FDA guidelines, designed to evaluate the safety and robustness of LLMs. By constructing a taxonomy of food safety principles and employing representative jailbreak attacks (e.g., AutoDAN and PAP), we systematically evaluate existing LLMs and guardrails. Our evaluation results reveal three critical vulnerabilities: First, current LLMs exhibit sparse safety alignment in the food-related domain, easily succumbing to a few canonical jailbreak strategies. Second, when compromised, LLMs frequently generate actionable yet harmful instructions, inadvertently empowering malicious actors and posing tangible risks. Third, existing LLM-based guardrails systematically overlook these domain-specific threats, failing to detect a substantial volume of malicious inputs. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, we introduce FoodGuard-4B, a specialized guardrail model fine-tuned on our datasets to safeguard LLMs within food-related domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cooking Up Risks: Benchmarking and Reducing Food Safety Risks in Large Language Models
Luo, Weidi
Wen, Xiaofei
Huang, Tenghao
Wang, Hongyi
Xiang, Zhen
Xiao, Chaowei
Gligorić, Kristina
Chen, Muhao
Cryptography and Security
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for everyday tasks, including food preparation and health-related guidance. However, food safety remains a high-stakes domain where inaccurate or misleading information can cause severe real-world harm. Despite these risks, current LLMs and safety guardrails lack rigorous alignment tailored to domain-specific food hazards. To address this gap, we introduce FoodGuardBench, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 3,339 queries grounded in FDA guidelines, designed to evaluate the safety and robustness of LLMs. By constructing a taxonomy of food safety principles and employing representative jailbreak attacks (e.g., AutoDAN and PAP), we systematically evaluate existing LLMs and guardrails. Our evaluation results reveal three critical vulnerabilities: First, current LLMs exhibit sparse safety alignment in the food-related domain, easily succumbing to a few canonical jailbreak strategies. Second, when compromised, LLMs frequently generate actionable yet harmful instructions, inadvertently empowering malicious actors and posing tangible risks. Third, existing LLM-based guardrails systematically overlook these domain-specific threats, failing to detect a substantial volume of malicious inputs. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, we introduce FoodGuard-4B, a specialized guardrail model fine-tuned on our datasets to safeguard LLMs within food-related domains.
title Cooking Up Risks: Benchmarking and Reducing Food Safety Risks in Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01444