mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis

arXiv 2604.02022 ↗First posted 2 Apr 2026cs.AIcited by 36

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating the safety of LLM-based agents is increasingly important because risks in realistic deployments often emerge over multi-step interactions rather than isolated prompts or final responses. Existing trajectory-level benchmarks remain limited by insufficient interaction diversity, coarse observability of safety failures, and weak long-horizon realism. We introduce ATBench, a trajectory-level benchmark for structured, diverse, and realistic evaluation of agent safety. ATBench organizes agentic risk along three dimensions: risk source, failure mode, and real-world harm. Based on this taxonomy, we construct trajectories with heterogeneous tool pools and a long-context delayed-trigger protocol that captures realistic risk emergence across multiple stages. The benchmark contains 1,000 trajectories (503 safe and 497 unsafe), averaging 9.01 turns and 3.95k tokens, with 1,954 invoked tools drawn from pools spanning 2,084 available tools. Data quality is supported by rule-based and LLM-based filtering plus full human audit. Experiments on frontier LLMs, open-source models, and specialized guard systems show that ATBench is challenging even for strong evaluators, while enabling taxonomy-stratified analysis, cross-benchmark comparison, and diagnosis of long-horizon failure patterns.

Key facts. Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 19 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.

Builds on

19 of 29 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026AgentDoG: A Diagnostic Guardrail Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security26 Jan
  2. 2025Building a Foundational Guardrail for General Agentic Systems via Synthetic Data10 Oct
  3. 2025ProbGuard: Proactive Runtime Monitoring for LLM Agent Safety via Probabilistic Prediction1 Aug
  4. 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents17 Jun
  5. 2025AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLM Agents31 May
  6. 2025ShieldAgent: Shielding Agents via Verifiable Safety Policy Reasoning26 Mar
  7. 2025AgentSpec: Customizable Runtime Enforcement for Safe and Reliable LLM Agents24 Mar
  8. 2024Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents19 Dec
  9. 2024R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents18 Jan

Other references · 10

  1. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,947
  2. 2023Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversationscited by 1,207
  3. 2023ToolAlpaca: Generalized Tool Learning for Language Models with 3000 Simulated Casescited by 393
  4. 2024ToolACE: Winning the Points of LLM Function Callingcited by 216
  5. 2025Qwen3Guard Technical Reportcited by 155
  6. 2025SafeToolBench: Pioneering a Prospective Benchmark to Evaluating Tool Utilization Safety in LLMscited by 22
  7. 2025EgoNight: Towards Egocentric Vision Understanding at Night with a Challenging Benchmarkcited by 19
  8. 2025Are Your Agents Upward Deceivers?cited by 16
  9. 2025Domain-RAG: Retrieval-Guided Compositional Image Generation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detectioncited by 15
  10. 2025Poly-Guard: Massive Multi-Domain Safety Policy-Grounded Guardrail Datasetcited by 14

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 36.

36 papers.

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  1. 2026OSWorld 2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Taskscited by 40
  2. 2026Auditing Agent Harness Safetycited by 11
  3. 2026PAST-Bench: Benchmarking the Foundations of Recursive Self-Improvement in Personal Agentscited by 9
  4. 2026TRACES: Proactive Safety Auditing for Multi-Turn LLM Agents via Trajectory-State Modelingcited by 8
  5. 2026AgentDoG 1.5: A Lightweight and Scalable Alignment Framework for AI Agent Safety and Securitycited by 8
  6. 2026Safety Testing LLM Agents at Scale: From Risk Discovery to Evidence-Grounded Verificationcited by 7
  7. 2026SHE: Trajectory-driven Safety Harness Evolution for LLM Agentscited by 6
  8. 2026StepGuard: Learning Step-Level Guardrails with Scalable Supervision and Safety-Utility Balancingcited by 6
  9. 2026Long-Horizon Agent Trajectory Attribution: A Unified Benchmark and Fine-Grained Annotation Frameworkcited by 4
  10. 2026OpenSkillRisk: Benchmarking Agent Safety When Using Real-World Risky Third-Party Skillscited by 3
  11. 2026AgentS4D: Benchmarking Runtime Risks across the Execution Lifecycle of LLM-Based Workspace Agentscited by 3
  12. 2026Automata from Agent Traces: Failure and Next-Step Predictioncited by 3
24 more
  1. 2026RUBAS: Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning for Agent Safetycited by 2
  2. 2026Agent Hacks Agent: Autoresearch for Production-Agent Red-Teamingcited by 2
  3. 2026SingGuard-NSFA: Extensible Guardrails for Agentic AI via Generative Reasoning and Real-Time Classificationcited by 2
  4. 2026AgentDrift: A Step-Labeled Benchmark of Injection-Hijacked LLM Agent Trajectoriescited by 2
  5. 2026Content-Aware Attack Detection in LLM Agent Tool-Call Traffic: An Empirical Study of Features, Architectures, and Evaluation Protocolscited by 1
  6. 2026PRISM: Preference-Aware Influence Function Based Data Selection Method for Efficient Fine-Tuningcited by 1
  7. 2026Online Agent-as-a-Judge: Situation-Generating Evaluation for Interactive Agentscited by 1
  8. 2026ClawTrack: Towards Trace-Level Evaluation and Improvement of Real-World Autonomous Agentscited by 1
  9. 2026RePolicy: Reinforcement Learning for Safety-Policy Invocation in Agent Safeguardscited by 0
  10. 2026AURA-Eval: Evaluation Framework for Acting Under Risk Awareness in LLM Agent Trajectoriescited by 0
  11. 2026Skynet: Workflow-Level Anomaly Detection for Agentic AI via Semantic and Structural Modelingcited by 0
  12. 2026DriftNet: A Dual-Head Trajectory Transformer for Detecting and Localizing Prompt Injection in LLM Agentscited by 0
  13. 2026HazardAuditor: From Executable Threats to Safer Computer-Use Agentscited by 0
  14. 2026"You're Right, Let Me Fix It": How LLM Agents Damage Correct Work When Falsely Accusedcited by 0
  15. 2026Trust the Brand, Lose Control: How Identity Hijacks LLM Agent Orchestrationcited by 0
  16. 2026Agent Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Trajectories from LLM Internal Statescited by 0
  17. 2026Auditing Agent Actions through Query-Conditioned Attributioncited by 0
  18. 2026Deny Without Disabling: Authorization-Paired Evaluation and Control for Multi-Agent Systemscited by 0
  19. 2026Positive-Unlabeled Learning for Agent Safety False Alarm Auditingcited by 0
  20. 2026Runtime Authorization of Self-Generated Subgoals in Long-Horizon Tool-Using AI Agentscited by 0
  21. 2026Safe Actions Alone Do Not Ensure Safe Agents: Identifying Unfulfilled Obligations with Guard Modelscited by 0
  22. 2026VEPA: Verified Evolving Formal Policy for Lifelong LLM Agent Guardrailscited by 0
  23. 2026MCAIR: Monitoring and Correcting Agent Unfaithfulness via Internal Representationscited by 0
  24. 2026Calibration and Risk-Budgeted Decisions with System One Modelscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026HINTBench: Horizon-agent Intrinsic Non-attack Trajectory Benchmark
  2. 2026Taxonomy and Consistency Analysis of Safety Benchmarks for AI Agents
  3. 2026PreAct-Bench: Benchmarking Predictive Monitoring in LLMs
  4. 2026PASTABench: Proactive Assessment of Sequential Trajectories for Agent Safety
  5. 2026Risky-Bench: Probing Agentic Safety Risks under Real-World Deployment
  6. 2026Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents
  7. 2026Toward a Principled Framework for Agent Safety Measurement
  8. 2026NEXUS: Structured Runtime Safety for Tool-Using LLM Agents