mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Positive-Unlabeled Learning for Agent Safety False Alarm Auditing

arXiv 2610.02925 ↗First posted 2 Oct 2026cs.AIcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Safety monitors help safeguard language-model agents interacting with external tools and environments, but conservative monitoring can generate many false alarms, consuming extensive review resources and weakening trust in alerts. Because false and genuine alarms often remain interleaved in native monitor scores, obtaining a reliable cutoff still requires substantial manual verification. In practice, a small set of verified-safe non-alarmed trajectories may be available while alarms remain unlabeled, naturally casting false-alarm auditing as a positive-unlabeled (PU) ranking problem. The key challenge is monitor-induced selection, since observed safe references are accepted by the monitor, while the hidden safe alarms of interest are precisely those it incorrectly flags, making the observed positives poorly representative of the positives to be recovered. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage framework in which Trust-aware PU Supervision adapts safe references toward the alarm domain and protects plausible false alarms from excessive negative pressure, while Reliability-gated Rank Distillation consolidates consistent ordering preferences from multiple PU reference models into a single student. Consensus-guided Structural Refinement then improves the student ranking using hierarchical safe-reference support, alarm relations, and predicted reference consensus. The framework requires no alarm safety labels for fitting and leaves the underlying monitor unchanged. Across mainstream safety monitors, our method achieves a macro AUPRC of 0.6444, outperforming eight evaluated PU baselines by 5.27--16.98 absolute percentage points; compared with PULDA, the strongest evaluated PU baseline, it recovers 33.3% more false alarms at a 5% review budget.

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 19 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

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19 of 32 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026StepGuard: Learning Step-Level Guardrails with Scalable Supervision and Safety-Utility Balancing25 Aug
  2. 2026TraceSafe: A Systematic Assessment of LLM Guardrails on Multi-Step Tool-Calling Trajectories8 Apr
  3. 2026ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis2 Apr
  4. 2026AgentDoG: A Diagnostic Guardrail Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security26 Jan
  5. 2025ShieldAgent: Shielding Agents via Verifiable Safety Policy Reasoning26 Mar
  6. 2024Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agents19 Dec
  7. 2024GuardAgent: Safeguard LLM Agents by a Guard Agent via Knowledge-Enabled Reasoning13 Jun
  8. 2024Can We Trust Embodied Agents? Exploring Backdoor Attacks against Embodied LLM-based Decision-Making Systems27 May
  9. 2024R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents18 Jan

Other references · 10

  1. 2017Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Non-Negative Risk Estimatorcited by 219
  2. 2021Non-Transferable Learning: A New Approach for Model Ownership Verification and Applicability Authorizationcited by 52
  3. 2022Dist-PU: Positive-Unlabeled Learning from a Label Distribution Perspectivecited by 38
  4. 2017Semi-Supervised AUC Optimization based on Positive-Unlabeled Learningcited by 20
  5. 2023Beyond Myopia: Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data through Holistic Predictive Trendscited by 10
  6. 2025Token Buncher: Shielding LLMs from Harmful Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuningcited by 8
  7. 2018Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data under the Selected At Random Assumptioncited by 5
  8. 2023Robust Positive-Unlabeled Learning via Noise Negative Sample Self-correctioncited by 5
  9. 2024Carbon Filter: Real-time Alert Triage Using Large Scale Clustering and Fast Searchcited by 1
  10. 2025Noisy-Pair Robust Representation Alignment for Positive-Unlabeled Learningcited by 1

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Not cited yet.

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  1. 2026DRAFT: Task Decoupled Latent Reasoning for Agent Safety
  2. 2026Enhancing Agent Safety Judgment: Controlled Benchmark Rewriting and Analogical Reasoning for Deceptive Out-of-Distribution Scenarios
  3. 2026From Probe Scores to Alarm Policies: Operational Validity of Activation Monitors for Language-Model Agents
  4. 2026PrefixGuard: From LLM-Agent Traces to Online Failure-Warning Monitors
  5. 2026Toward a Principled Framework for Agent Safety Measurement
  6. 2026StepSafe: Learning Timely Intervention with Context-Aware Safety Reasoning
  7. 2023XSTest: A Test Suite for Identifying Exaggerated Safety Behaviours in Large Language Models
  8. 2026The Cold-Start Safety Gap in LLM Agents