# Towards a Unified Misuse Monitoring Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07089/

## 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 45 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)
- LLM safety and security / [Prompt injection and agent security](https://mlsanity.com/safety/prompt-injection-and-agent-security/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09527/) (2022)
- [InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02691/) (2024)
- [WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18495/) (2024)
- [The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13208/) (2024)
- [AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09024/) (2024)
- [Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01833/) (2024)
- [Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11926/) (2025)
- [StruQ: Defending Against Prompt Injection with Structured Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06363/) (2024)
- [Formalizing and Benchmarking Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12815/) (2023)
- [A Holistic Approach to Undesired Content Detection in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03274/) (2022)
- [Defeating Prompt Injections by Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18813/) (2025)
- [R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10019/) (2024)
- [Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks With Spotlighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14720/) (2024)
- [Gemma 4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02770/) (2026)
- [ShieldGemma: Generative AI Content Moderation Based on Gemma](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21772/) (2024)
- [Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18837/) (2025)
- [Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14499/) (2025)
- [Qwen3Guard Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14276/) (2025)
- [LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15221/) (2024)
- [LlamaFirewall: An open source guardrail system for building secure AI agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03574/) (2025)
- [AgentAuditor: Human-Level Safety and Security Evaluation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00641/) (2025)
- [MELON: Provable Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks in AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05174/) (2025)
- [Get my drift? Catching LLM Task Drift with Activation Deltas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00799/) (2024)
- [SHADE-Arena: Evaluating Sabotage and Monitoring in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15740/) (2025)
- [AgentDoG: A Diagnostic Guardrail Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18491/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM agents increasingly act in multi-actor environments, exposing them to misuse from multiple sources: decomposition attacks, where a harmful request is split into innocuous sub-requests, and prompt injection attacks, where a compromised tool delivers a malicious instruction. Existing evaluations treat these threats separately and ask whether a trajectory is harmful, rather than when it becomes harmful. We propose monitoring the agent's responses, where its actions are externalised, and ask whether the first point where monitors identify harm lands within a harm window (from the agent's first harmful commitment to goal execution). We develop a unified formalism for trace-level misuse monitoring and use it to construct a benchmark of ~6,200 conversation transcripts between a user, an LLM agent, and the external environment, spanning both threats in a shared schema, with a labelled harm window, corresponding benign controls, and matched instances of refusals to these requests. Across 17 monitor configurations, we find that our proposed action-framed monitors perform well on both threats under classical metrics (AUC: 0.95 and 0.99 respectively), while content-framed monitors collapse on injection attacks (AUC: 0.52). We also show that classical position-blind metrics paint an optimistic picture of monitor performance, since all monitors localise decomposition attacks poorly under the interval metric, which measures the ability to localise harm. Broadly, we illustrate the need for a unified study of misuse monitoring.