Abstract:As LLM-based agents expand their operational scope, reliability becomes a prerequisite for real-world deployment. However, in practical applications, human users cannot monitor every immediate behavior; instead, the execution process often remains a black box, leaving users dependent solely on the agent's self-reported updates. This opacity creates a critical risk: agents may present observer-facing reports that diverge from their executed actions, rendering the system uncontrollable, especially in high-stakes autonomous scenarios. We term such self-reported plan-action divergence as agent deception. To assess this, we introduce SPADE-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate spontaneous plan-action divergence. Unlike prior deception benchmarks, SPADE-Bench simultaneously integrates actual tool execution and controlled pressure scenarios. This design ensures ecological validity and rigorously distinguishes strategic deception from mere hallucination through controlled plan-action comparisons under pressure. Experiments across mainstream models confirm that agent deception is a genuine and pressing issue in tool-use contexts. By providing a comprehensive and robust evaluation framework, SPADE-Bench fills a critical gap in agent safety, facilitating the community's progress toward building trustworthy and controllable autonomous systems.
Abstract: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.
Abstract:Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as scalable simulators for robot learning, yet current evaluations provide limited evidence that their predictions are reliable under the actions they condition on. Existing benchmarks largely emphasize visual fidelity, leaving unclear whether predicted futures are physically plausible, faithful to commanded actions, and calibrated to failure when actions should not succeed. We introduce \textsc{MiraBench}, a hierarchical benchmark that defines \emph{action-conditioned reliability} as a core evaluation target for robotic world models. MiraBench decomposes this target into three progressively demanding levels: \emph{Physics Adherence}, which evaluates reference-free physical consistency; \emph{Action-Following Fidelity}, which measures whether predictions respect task-relevant action inputs; and \emph{Optimism Bias Detection}, which probes the tendency to predict successful outcomes under failure-inducing actions. To support this evaluation, we curate a human-annotated corpus with over 16,000 judgments across tasks, failure categories, and leading world models. We evaluate 12 representative model configurations spanning vector-conditioned robotic world models, text-conditioned generative world models, open-weight systems, closed-source systems, and multiple model scales. Across this broad model landscape, MiraBench reveals three central findings: visual fidelity is a poor proxy for action fidelity; increasing model scale does not reliably improve action following; and optimism bias is pervasive across current systems. By shifting evaluation from appearance to action-conditioned reliability, MiraBench provides a diagnostic foundation for assessing and improving robotic world models as faithful simulators.
Abstract:The real-world deployment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains limited by the risk of unpredictable and irreversible physical harm. However, we currently lack effective mechanisms to proactively detect these physical safety risks before deployment. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{RedVLA}, the first red teaming framework for physical safety in VLA models. We systematically uncover unsafe behaviors through a two-stage process: (I) \textbf{Risk Scenario Synthesis} constructs a valid and task-feasible initial risk scene. Specifically, it identifies critical interaction regions from benign trajectories and positions the risk factor within these regions, aiming to entangle it with the VLA's execution flow and elicit a target unsafe behavior. (II) \textbf{Risk Amplification} ensures stable elicitation across heterogeneous models. It iteratively refines the risk factor state through gradient-free optimization guided by trajectory features. Experiments on six representative VLA models show that RedVLA uncovers diverse unsafe behaviors and achieves the ASR up to 95.5\% within 10 optimization iterations. To mitigate these risks, we further propose SimpleVLA-Guard, a lightweight safety guard built from RedVLA-generated data. Our data, assets, and code are available \href{https://redvla.github.io}{here}.
Abstract:We present ShuttleEnv, an interactive and data-driven simulation environment for badminton, designed to support reinforcement learning and strategic behavior analysis in fast-paced adversarial sports. The environment is grounded in elite-player match data and employs explicit probabilistic models to simulate rally-level dynamics, enabling realistic and interpretable agent-opponent interactions without relying on physics-based simulation. In this demonstration, we showcase multiple trained agents within ShuttleEnv and provide live, step-by-step visualization of badminton rallies, allowing attendees to explore different play styles, observe emergent strategies, and interactively analyze decision-making behaviors. ShuttleEnv serves as a reusable platform for research, visualization, and demonstration of intelligent agents in sports AI. Our ShuttleEnv demo video URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hTR4P16U27H2O0-w316bR73pxE2ucczX/view
Abstract:Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with nuanced human values remains a critical challenge, as existing methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often handle only coarse-grained attributes. In practice, fine-tuning LLMs on task-specific datasets to optimize value alignment inevitably incurs an alignment tax: the model's pre-calibrated value system drifts significantly due to latent bias absorption from training data, while the fine-tuning process also causes severe hallucinations and semantic information loss in generated responses. To address this, we propose VISA (Value Injection via Shielded Adaptation), a closed-loop framework designed to navigate this trade-off. VISA's architecture features a high-precision value detector, a semantic-to-value translator, and a core value-rewriter. The value-rewriter is trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a composite reward function that simultaneously optimizes for fine-grained value precision, and the preservation of semantic integrity. By learning an optimal policy to balance these competing objectives, VISA effectively mitigates the alignment tax while staying loyal to the original knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach enables precise control over a model's value expression while maintaining its factual consistency and general capabilities, significantly outperforming both standard fine-tuning methods and prompting-based baselines, including GPT-4o.
Abstract:The rapid advancement of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) has demonstrated excellent abilities in various visual tasks. Building upon these developments, the thinking with images paradigm has emerged, enabling models to dynamically edit and re-encode visual information at each reasoning step, mirroring human visual processing. However, this paradigm introduces significant challenges as diverse errors may occur during reasoning processes. This necessitates Process Reward Models (PRMs) for distinguishing positive and negative reasoning steps, yet existing benchmarks for PRMs are predominantly text-centric and lack comprehensive assessment under this paradigm. To address these gaps, this work introduces the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating PRMs under the thinking with images paradigm. Our main contributions are: (1) Through extensive analysis of reasoning trajectories and guided search experiments with PRMs, we define 7 fine-grained error types and demonstrate both the necessity for specialized PRMs and the potential for improvement. (2) We construct a comprehensive benchmark comprising 1,206 manually annotated thinking with images reasoning trajectories spanning 4 categories and 16 subcategories for fine-grained evaluation of PRMs. (3) Our experimental analysis reveals that current LVLMs fall short as effective PRMs, exhibiting limited capabilities in visual reasoning process evaluation with significant performance disparities across error types, positive evaluation bias, and sensitivity to reasoning step positions. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and establish crucial foundations for advancing PRMs in LVLMs.
Abstract:The rise of AI agents introduces complex safety and security challenges arising from autonomous tool use and environmental interactions. Current guardrail models lack agentic risk awareness and transparency in risk diagnosis. To introduce an agentic guardrail that covers complex and numerous risky behaviors, we first propose a unified three-dimensional taxonomy that orthogonally categorizes agentic risks by their source (where), failure mode (how), and consequence (what). Guided by this structured and hierarchical taxonomy, we introduce a new fine-grained agentic safety benchmark (ATBench) and a Diagnostic Guardrail framework for agent safety and security (AgentDoG). AgentDoG provides fine-grained and contextual monitoring across agent trajectories. More Crucially, AgentDoG can diagnose the root causes of unsafe actions and seemingly safe but unreasonable actions, offering provenance and transparency beyond binary labels to facilitate effective agent alignment. AgentDoG variants are available in three sizes (4B, 7B, and 8B parameters) across Qwen and Llama model families. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AgentDoG achieves state-of-the-art performance in agentic safety moderation in diverse and complex interactive scenarios. All models and datasets are openly released.
Abstract:Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) seeks to maximize rewards while satisfying safety constraints, typically addressed through Lagrangian-based methods. However, existing approaches, including PID and classical Lagrangian methods, suffer from oscillations and frequent safety violations due to parameter sensitivity and inherent phase lag. To address these limitations, we propose ADRC-Lagrangian methods that leverage Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) for enhanced robustness and reduced oscillations. Our unified framework encompasses classical and PID Lagrangian methods as special cases while significantly improving safety performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces safety violations by up to 74%, constraint violation magnitudes by 89%, and average costs by 67\%, establishing superior effectiveness for Safe RL in complex environments.
Abstract:While Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are rapidly advancing towards generalist robot policies, it remains difficult to quantitatively understand their limits and failure modes. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark called VLA-Arena. We propose a novel structured task design framework to quantify difficulty across three orthogonal axes: (1) Task Structure, (2) Language Command, and (3) Visual Observation. This allows us to systematically design tasks with fine-grained difficulty levels, enabling a precise measurement of model capability frontiers. For Task Structure, VLA-Arena's 170 tasks are grouped into four dimensions: Safety, Distractor, Extrapolation, and Long Horizon. Each task is designed with three difficulty levels (L0-L2), with fine-tuning performed exclusively on L0 to assess general capability. Orthogonal to this, language (W0-W4) and visual (V0-V4) perturbations can be applied to any task to enable a decoupled analysis of robustness. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLAs reveals several critical limitations, including a strong tendency toward memorization over generalization, asymmetric robustness, a lack of consideration for safety constraints, and an inability to compose learned skills for long-horizon tasks. To foster research addressing these challenges and ensure reproducibility, we provide the complete VLA-Arena framework, including an end-to-end toolchain from task definition to automated evaluation and the VLA-Arena-S/M/L datasets for fine-tuning. Our benchmark, data, models, and leaderboard are available at https://vla-arena.github.io.