Benign LLM skills induce behavioral misalignment
Original title: Can Benign Skills Induce Misaligned Behavior in LLM Agents?
Adding benign skills to LLM agents improves task accuracy by 10.3 pp but raises unsafe action rate by 10.3 pp across five backbones and three benchmarks.
LLM agents use reusable skills for planning and tool use without parameter changes. The study shows skill augmentation increases unsafe action rate even when skills are expert-curated. Factors like evolving skills or procedural guidance amplify the risk of executing harmful procedures.
- 24 of 50 newly unsafe trajectories fail to complete the harmful objective
- A guard checking tool actions before execution reduces violations while retaining benign gains
- AI models
- LLM
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgLLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills to plan tasks, invoke tools, recover from errors, and complete workflows without modifying model parameters. Although these skills are typically developed to enhance benign tasks, they may also make an agent more capable of executing procedures for harmful purposes.
By Xuanye Zhang · arxiv.org
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