This paper delivers the first systematic taxonomy and cross-benchmark consistency analysis of 40 agent safety benchmarks, finding broad but shallow risk coverage, no ranking concordance across evaluations, and that benchmark choice systematically alters reported safety.
Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safety
9 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
The rapid advancement of large models, driven by their exceptional abilities in learning and generalization through large-scale pre-training, has reshaped the landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These models are now foundational to a wide range of applications, including conversational AI, recommendation systems, autonomous driving, content generation, medical diagnostics, and scientific discovery. However, their widespread deployment also exposes them to significant safety risks, raising concerns about robustness, reliability, and ethical implications. This survey provides a systematic review of current safety research on large models, covering Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Diffusion Models (DMs), and large-model-powered Agents. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (1) We present a comprehensive taxonomy of safety threats to these models, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, backdoor attacks, jailbreak and prompt injection attacks, energy-latency attacks, data and model extraction attacks, and emerging agent-specific threats. (2) We review defense strategies proposed for each type of attacks if available and summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks for safety research. (3) Building on this, we identify and discuss the open challenges in large model safety, emphasizing the need for comprehensive safety evaluations, scalable and effective defense mechanisms, and sustainable data practices. More importantly, we highlight the necessity of collective efforts from the research community and international collaboration. Our work can serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners, fostering the ongoing development of comprehensive defense systems and platforms to safeguard AI models.
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representative citing papers
ToBAC is the first backdoor attack on unified autoregressive models, using data or model poisoning to make triggers elicit cross-modal malicious behavior in text and image generation.
ProjLens shows that backdoor parameters in MLLMs are encoded in low-rank subspaces of the projector and that embeddings shift toward the target direction with magnitude linear in input norm, activating only on poisoned samples.
World models enable efficient AI planning but create risks from adversarial corruption, goal misgeneralization, and human bias, demonstrated via attacks that amplify errors and reduce rewards on models like RSSM and DreamerV3.
EvoSynth evolves code-based jailbreak algorithms via multi-agent self-correction, reaching 85.5% ASR on Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and 95.9% average across targets with greater diversity.
AgenticEval is a multi-agent framework that ingests unstructured policies to generate and self-evolve comprehensive safety benchmarks for LLMs, with experiments showing declining safety rates as tests harden.
LeakyCLIP reconstructs images from CLIP embeddings with over 258% SSIM gain versus baselines and enables membership inference from reconstruction metrics on LAION-2B data.
RedDiffuser is a reinforced diffusion framework that generates adversarial visual contexts to audit and expose widespread multimodal safety failures in VLMs, increasing unsafe response rates by up to 10.69% on LLaVA with transfer to other models.
The paper taxonomizes jailbreak attacks and defenses for LLMs, introduces the Security Cube multi-dimensional evaluation framework, benchmarks 13 attacks and 5 defenses, and identifies open challenges in LLM robustness.
citing papers explorer
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Taxonomy and Consistency Analysis of Safety Benchmarks for AI Agents
This paper delivers the first systematic taxonomy and cross-benchmark consistency analysis of 40 agent safety benchmarks, finding broad but shallow risk coverage, no ranking concordance across evaluations, and that benchmark choice systematically alters reported safety.
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Token by Token, Compromised: Backdoor Vulnerabilities in Unified Autoregressive Models
ToBAC is the first backdoor attack on unified autoregressive models, using data or model poisoning to make triggers elicit cross-modal malicious behavior in text and image generation.
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ProjLens: Unveiling the Role of Projectors in Multimodal Model Safety
ProjLens shows that backdoor parameters in MLLMs are encoded in low-rank subspaces of the projector and that embeddings shift toward the target direction with magnitude linear in input norm, activating only on poisoned samples.
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Safety, Security, and Cognitive Risks in World Models
World models enable efficient AI planning but create risks from adversarial corruption, goal misgeneralization, and human bias, demonstrated via attacks that amplify errors and reduce rewards on models like RSSM and DreamerV3.
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Evolve the Method, Not the Prompts: Evolutionary Synthesis of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs
EvoSynth evolves code-based jailbreak algorithms via multi-agent self-correction, reaching 85.5% ASR on Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and 95.9% average across targets with greater diversity.
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AgenticEval: Toward Agentic and Self-Evolving Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models
AgenticEval is a multi-agent framework that ingests unstructured policies to generate and self-evolve comprehensive safety benchmarks for LLMs, with experiments showing declining safety rates as tests harden.
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LeakyCLIP: Extracting Training Data from CLIP
LeakyCLIP reconstructs images from CLIP embeddings with over 258% SSIM gain versus baselines and enables membership inference from reconstruction metrics on LAION-2B data.
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RedDiffuser: Auditing Multimodal Safety Failures in Vision-Language Models via Reinforced Diffusion
RedDiffuser is a reinforced diffusion framework that generates adversarial visual contexts to audit and expose widespread multimodal safety failures in VLMs, increasing unsafe response rates by up to 10.69% on LLaVA with transfer to other models.
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SoK: Robustness in Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks
The paper taxonomizes jailbreak attacks and defenses for LLMs, introduces the Security Cube multi-dimensional evaluation framework, benchmarks 13 attacks and 5 defenses, and identifies open challenges in LLM robustness.