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.
Authors
- ChengXiang Zhai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6434-3702)
- Heng Ji (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0464-7966)
- Di Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2526-8954)
- Chuanbin Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2076-1133)
Institutions
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
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
Funders
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency