LatentRiskBench: Measuring State-Dependent Risks in Enterprise Agents
cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-13
Updated: 2026-10-13
Comments: Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Industry Track. 18 pages, 3 figures
Code: https://github.com/JingyueCong/LatentRiskBench
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Enterprise agents face safety risks that cannot be determined from individual actions alone.
Abstract
Enterprise agents face safety risks that cannot be determined from individual actions alone. Existing safety benchmarks largely evaluate action-local risks, overlooking failures whose safety depends on workflow state. In such state-dependent risks, the same action may be safe in one context but violate policy in another. Hence, we introduce LatentRiskBench for evaluating such state-dependent risks in enterprise settings. It pairs risky trajectories with benign counterparts that share the same terminal action but differ in latent policy-relevant states, requiring models to reconstruct workflow context rather than rely on action-level cues. We also introduce new metrics for state-dependent risk evaluation, including a suite of residual risk (RR) measures. Experiments on the benchmark show that action-level evaluation detects only 0.09 of state-dependent violations, whereas state-level evaluation reaches 0.96. Existing guardrail methods largely overlook such risks unless they are explicitly applied to workflow states. Case studies on a commercial deployed scenario further show that the safety metrics embedded in the benchmark provide a more realistic measure of safety for enterprise agents. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/JingyueCong/LatentRiskBench.
Sources
- SafePred: A Predictive Guardrail for Computer-Using Agents via World Models
- ShieldAgent: Shielding Agents via Verifiable Safety Policy Reasoning
- WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks
- Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations
- ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agents
- The Llama 3 Herd of Models
- AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLM Agents
- Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models
- GuardAgent: Safeguard LLM Agents by a Guard Agent via Knowledge-Enabled Reasoning
- Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents
- WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents
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