PASTABench: Proactive Assessment of Sequential Trajectories for Agent Safety

arXiv:2609.28197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents that alter real-world states, ensuring operational safety across multi-step workflows has become a critical challenge. While recent work has moved beyond single-turn evaluation toward multi-turn paradigms, key limitations persist: step-level methods treat actions in isolation, missing how risks accumulate, while trajectory-level evaluations operate post-hoc, offering no opportunity for timely intervention. To address these limitations, we formalize Decoupled Proactive Safety Monitoring along three dimensions: whether to intervene, when to intervene, and what the risk is. We introduce PASTABench, a benchmark of 1,139 multi-turn trajectories spanning 5 risk categories and 13 subcategories. We further propose the Optimal Intervention Window (OIW), anchored by annotated Earliest-Signal and Trigger turns, to quantify intervention timeliness. Evaluation of 16 LLMs reveals that proactive intervention remains largely unsolved, with the best model achieving only 40.74% optimal-timing interventions. Fine-grained diagnosis further uncovers pervasive lexical overfitting: competitive safety scores of smaller models mask keyword hypersensitivity rather than genuine risk comprehension, as their proactive capability largely collapses once hazard vocabulary is neutralized.

Abstract:As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents that alter real-world states, ensuring operational safety across multi-step workflows has become a critical challenge. While recent work has moved beyond single-turn evaluation toward multi-turn paradigms, key limitations persist: step-level methods treat actions in isolation, missing how risks accumulate, while trajectory-level evaluations operate post-hoc, offering no opportunity for timely intervention. To address these limitations, we formalize Decoupled Proactive Safety Monitoring along three dimensions: whether to intervene, when to intervene, and what the risk is. We introduce PASTABench, a benchmark of 1,139 multi-turn trajectories spanning 5 risk categories and 13 subcategories. We further propose the Optimal Intervention Window (OIW), anchored by annotated Earliest-Signal and Trigger turns, to quantify intervention timeliness. Evaluation of 16 LLMs reveals that proactive intervention remains largely unsolved, with the best model achieving only 40.74% optimal-timing interventions. Fine-grained diagnosis further uncovers pervasive lexical overfitting: competitive safety scores of smaller models mask keyword hypersensitivity rather than genuine risk comprehension, as their proactive capability largely collapses once hazard vocabulary is neutralized.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.28197 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.28197v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28197 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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PASTABench: Proactive Assessment of Sequential Trajectories for Agent Safety

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