Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation

Given the growing influence of language modelbased agents on high-stakes societal decisions, from public policy to healthcare, ensuring their beneficial impact requires understanding the far-reaching implications of their suggestions.We propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-generated advice could propagate through societal systems on a macroscopic scale over time, enabling more robust alignment.To assess the long-term safety awareness of language models, we also introduce a dataset of 100 indirect harm scenarios, testing models' ability to foresee adverse, nonobvious outcomes from seemingly harmless user prompts.Our approach achieves not only over 20% improvement on the new dataset but also an average win rate exceeding 70% against strong baselines on existing safety benchmarks (AdvBench, SafeRLHF, WildGuardMix), suggesting a promising direction for safer agents.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.332
Primary Topic
Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation

ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji, Di Zhang, Chuanbin Sun
Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
article

Beyond Reactive Safety: Risk-Aware LLM Alignment via Long-Horizon Simulation

ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji, Di Zhang, Chuanbin Sun
article en

Abstract

Given the growing influence of language modelbased agents on high-stakes societal decisions, from public policy to healthcare, ensuring their beneficial impact requires understanding the far-reaching implications of their suggestions.We propose a proof-of-concept framework that projects how model-generated advice could propagate through societal systems on a macroscopic scale over time, enabling more robust alignment.To assess the long-term safety awareness of language models, we also introduce a dataset of 100 indirect harm scenarios, testing models' ability to foresee adverse, nonobvious outcomes from seemingly harmless user prompts.Our approach achieves not only over 20% improvement on the new dataset but also an average win rate exceeding 70% against strong baselines on existing safety benchmarks (AdvBench, SafeRLHF, WildGuardMix), suggesting a promising direction for safer agents.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Climate action
Openalex Percentile: Top 77%
Safety Systems Engineering in Autonomy
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