← Back to Library

SafeMind: Benchmarking and Mitigating Safety Risks in Embodied LLM Agents

Authors: Ruolin Chen, Yinqian Sun, Jihang Wang, Mingyang Lv, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng

Published: 2025-09-30

arXiv ID: 2509.25885v1

Added to Library: 2025-10-01 04:02 UTC

Safety

📄 Abstract

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.

🔍 Key Points

  • The paper introduces SafeMind, a comprehensive framework for assessing and mitigating safety risks in embodied agents powered by large language models (LLMs).
  • It formalizes a four-stage reasoning pipeline highlighting critical safety risks and categorizes them into Factual, Causal, and Temporal constraints.
  • SafeMindBench is presented as a robust multimodal benchmark encompassing 5,558 diverse scenarios to test the safety of LLMs in practical tasks.
  • Experiments demonstrate significant vulnerabilities in leading LLMs and existing agent architectures, with the SafeMindAgent showing marked improvements in safety rates and task performance through modular safety checks.
  • SafeMindAgent employs a unique modular architecture that incorporates safety constraints at every reasoning stage, resulting in reduced unsafe behaviors while successfully completing tasks.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is highly relevant due to its advancement in understanding and tackling safety issues in embodied AI agents. By introducing rigorous evaluations and practical solutions, it contributes to the ongoing dialogue on ensuring the safe deployment of AI technologies in real-world applications. The findings are crucial for the development of systems that can operate reliably and securely in dynamic environments.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

AI security researchers will find this paper of great interest as it specifically addresses safety hazards associated with embodied AI systems, an area gaining urgency with the proliferation of autonomous agents. The identification of vulnerabilities and the provision of systematic mitigation strategies offer valuable insights into improving the robustness and reliability of AI systems, thus advancing the field of AI safety and security.

📚 Read the Full Paper