Building a Foundational Guardrail for General Agentic Systems via Synthetic Data
Yue Huang, Hang Hua, Yujun Zhou, Pengcheng Jing, Manish Nagireddy, Inkit Padhi, Greta Dolcetti, Zhangchen Xu, Subhajit Chaudhury, Ambrish Rawat, Liubov Nedoshivina, Pin-Yu Chen
Abstract
While LLM agents can plan multi-step tasks, intervening at the planning stage-before any action is executed-is often the safest way to prevent harm, since certain risks can lead to severe consequences once carried out. However, existing guardrails mostly operate post-execution, which is difficult to scale and leaves little room for controllable supervision at the plan level. To address this challenge, we highlight three critical gaps in current research: data gap, model gap, and evaluation gap. To close the data gap, we introduce AuraGen, a controllable engine that (i) synthesizes benign trajectories, (ii) injects category-labeled risks with calibrated difficulty, and (iii) filters outputs via an automated reward model, producing large and reliable corpora for pre-execution safety. To close the guardian model gap, we propose a foundational guardrail Safiron, combining a cross-planner adapter with a compact guardian model. The adapter unifies different input formats, while Safiron flags risky cases, assigns risk types, and generates rationales; trained in two stages with a broadly explored data recipe, Safiron achieves robust transfer across settings. To close the evaluation gap, we release Pre-Exec Bench, a realistic benchmark covering diverse tools and branching trajectories, which measures detection, fine-grained categorization, explanation, and cross-planner generalization in human-verified scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains of the proposed guardrail over strong baselines on Pre-Exec Bench, and ablations further distill actionable practices, providing a practical template for safer agentic systems.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext eac46ea9-c03c-478c-bbbc-81006bbdb636Cited by top-tier papers6
- When Actions Go Off-Task: Detecting and Correcting Misaligned Actions in Computer-Use AgentsYuting Ning, Jaylen Jones, Zhehao Zhang, Chentao Ye et al.ICML 2026 · 7 citations
- AIR: Improving Agent Safety through Incident ResponseZibo Xiao, Jun Sun, Junjie ChenICML 2026 · 5 citations
- ProbeLLM: Automating Principled Diagnosis of LLM FailuresYue Huang, Zhengzhe Jiang, Yuchen Ma, Yu Jiang et al.ICML 2026 · 4 citations
- MATE: Policy-Aware Security Auditing for Mobile Agents via Synthesis-Driven Trajectory LearningChangyue Jiang, Jiayi Wang, Xin Wen, Jiarun Dai et al.USENIX Security 2026
- Domain Generalizable AI Guardrails with Augmented Policy TrainingMinqian Liu, Ioana Baldini, David Rabinowitz, David S. Rosenberg et al.ACL 2026
Builds on16
- MetaTool Benchmark for Large Language Models: Deciding Whether to Use Tools and Which to UseYue Huang, Jiawen Shi, Yuan Li, Chenrui Fan et al.ICLR 2024 · 188 citations
- Prompt Injection Attack to Tool Selection in LLM AgentsJiawen Shi, Zenghui Yuan, Guiyao Tie, Pan Zhou et al.NDSS 2026 · 181 citations
- Aligning to Thousands of Preferences via System Message GeneralizationSeongyun Lee, Sue Hyun Park, Seungone Kim, Minjoon SeoNeurIPS 2024 · 102 citations
- OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework For Evaluating Real-World AI Agent SafetySanidhya Vijayvargiya, Aditya Bharat Soni, Xuhui Zhou, Zora Zhiruo Wang et al.ICLR 2026 · 75 citations
- HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF FrameworkGuangming Sheng, Chi Zhang, Zilingfeng Ye, Xibin Wu et al.EuroSys 2025 · 61 citations
Related papers
- GuardAgent: Safeguard LLM Agents via Knowledge-Enabled ReasoningZhen Xiang, Linzhi Zheng, Yanjie Li, Junyuan Hong et al.ICML 2025
- AGrail: A Lifelong Agent Guardrail with Effective and Adaptive Safety DetectionWeidi Luo, Shenghong Dai, Xiaogeng Liu, Suman Banerjee et al.ACL 2025 · 41 citations
- GuardBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Guardrail ModelsElias Bassani, Ignacio SanchezEMNLP 2024 · 7 citations
- R2-Guard: Robust Reasoning Enabled LLM Guardrail via Knowledge-Enhanced Logical ReasoningMintong Kang, Bo LiICLR 2025
- IS-Bench: Evaluating Interactive Safety of VLM-Driven Embodied Agents in Daily Household TasksXiaoya Lu, Zeren Chen, Xuhao Hu, Yijin Zhou et al.AAAI 2026 · 20 citations
