BLINDSPOT: A Benchmark for Safety and Refusal Calibration in Long-Horizon Tool-Using Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long-horizon interactions involving tool use, persistent state, evolving authorization, and external environment feedback. In such settings, safety failures may emerge only after multiple turns, yet existing evaluations often reduce agent behavior to task or attack success, obscuring whether an agent acts, refuses, or remains appropriately calibrated as the interaction evolves. We introduce Blindspot, a benchmark for trajectory-level safety calibration of long-horizon tool-using agents. Blindspot evaluates complete user-agent-environment trajectories through adaptive adversarial interaction, stateful tool execution, and execution-grounded adjudication. Its current instantiation contains 22 attack families and 35 scenarios across seven domains, yielding more than 2,500 long-horizon trajectories with an average interaction length of 14.7 turns. Each trajectory is assigned one of five outcomes: Safe Completion, Correct Refusal, Unsafe Completion, Over-Refusal, or Indeterminate. Unlike fixed attack datasets, Blindspot is an extensible live-simulation framework in which attacks, scenarios, tools, policies, domains, and agent configurations can be added without redesigning the evaluation pipeline. We evaluate 13 proprietary and open-weight LLMs using eight metrics covering unsafe completion, appropriate refusal, benign utility, over-refusal, repeated-run robustness, and post-refusal failure. Preliminary results reveal substantial differences in safety-utility calibration across models and show that failures can emerge only after several initially safe interaction steps. These findings motivate treating agent safety as a trajectory-level property rather than a single-turn or binary success criterion.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 21 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2026.
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21 of 28 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Boiling the Frog: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Agentic Safety21 May
- 2026AgentLAB: Benchmarking LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Attacks18 Feb
- 2026Information-Theoretic Privacy Control for Sequential Multi-Agent LLM Systems13 Feb
- 2026Unsafer in Many Turns: Benchmarking and Defending Multi-Turn Safety Risks in Tool-Using Agents13 Feb
- 2025Prompt Injection Attack to Tool Selection in LLM Agents28 Apr
- 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
- 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents5 Mar
Other references · 14
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,402
- 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,267
- 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 627
- 2025Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMscited by 431
- 2023Formalizing and Benchmarking Prompt Injection Attacks and Defensescited by 364
- 2024Automatic and Universal Prompt Injection Attacks against Large Language Modelscited by 119
- 2025Thought Communication in Multiagent Collaborationcited by 30
- 2026Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Taskscited by 21
- 2025Are the Hidden States Hiding Something? Testing the Limits of Factuality-Encoding Capabilities in LLMscited by 11
- 2026LLM Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Content with Internal Representationscited by 11
- 2026ToolFailBench: Diagnosing Tool-Use Failures in LLM Agentscited by 11
- 2025LLM-as-a-Judge for Privacy Evaluation? Exploring the Alignment of Human and LLM Perceptions of Privacy in Textual Datacited by 10
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