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Safety in Embodied AI: A Survey of Risks, Attacks, and Defenses

arXiv:2605.02900v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) integrates perception, cognition, planning, and interaction into agents that operate in open-world, safety-critical environments. As these systems gain autonomy and enter domains such as transportation, healthcare, and industrial or assistive robotics, ensuring their safety becomes both technically challenging and socially indispensable. Unlike digital AI systems, embodied agents must act under uncertain sensing, incomplete knowledge, and dynamic human-robot interactions, where failures can directly lead to physical harm. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of safety research in embodied AI, examining attacks and defenses across the full embodied pipeline, from perception and cognition to planning, action and interaction, and agentic system. We introduce a multi-level taxonomy that unifies fragmented lines of work and connects embodied-specific safety findings with broader advances in vision, language, and multimodal foundation models. Our review synthesizes insights from over 500 papers spanning adversarial, backdoor, jailbreak, and hardware-level attacks; attack detection, safe training and robust inference; and risk-aware human-agent interaction. This analysis reveals several overlooked challenges, including the fragility of multimodal perception fusion, the instability of planning under jailbreak attacks, and the trustworthiness of human-agent interaction in open-ended scenarios. By organizing the field into a coherent framework and identifying critical research gaps, this survey provides a roadmap for building embodied agents that are not only capable and autonomous but also safe, robust, and reliable in real-world deployment.

Improving Efficiency of GPU Kernel Optimization Agents using a Domain-Specific Language and Speed-of-Light Guidance

arXiv:2603.29010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing GPU kernels with LLM agents is an iterative process over a large design space. Every candidate must be generated, compiled, validated, and profiled, so fewer trials will save both runtime and cost. We make two key observations. First, the abstraction level that agents operate at is important. If it is too low, the LLM wastes reasoning on low-impact details. If it is too high, it may miss important optimization choices. Second, agents cannot easily tell when they reach the point of diminishing returns, wasting resources as they continue searching. These observations motivate two design principles to improve efficiency: (1) a compact domain-specific language (DSL) that can be learned in context and lets the model reason at a higher level while preserving important optimization levers, and (2) Speed-of-Light (SOL) guidance that uses first-principles performance bounds to steer and budget search. We implement these principles in $\mu$CUTLASS, a DSL with a compiler for CUTLASS-backed GPU kernels that covers kernel configuration, epilogue fusion, and multi-stage pipelines. We use SOL guidance to estimate headroom and guide optimization trials, deprioritize problems that are near SOL, and flag kernels that game the benchmark. On 59 KernelBench problems with the same iteration budgets, switching from generating low-level code to DSL code using GPT-5-mini turns a 0.40x geomean regression into a 1.27x speedup over PyTorch. Adding SOL-guided steering raises this to 1.56x. Across model tiers, $\mu$CUTLASS + SOL-guidance lets weaker models outperform stronger baseline agents at lower token cost. SOL-guided budgeting saves 19-43% of tokens while retaining at least 95% of geomean speedup, with the best policy reaching a 1.68x efficiency gain. Lastly, SOL analysis helps detect benchmark-gaming cases, where kernels may appear fast while failing to perform the intended computation.

JFTA-Bench: Evaluate LLM's Ability of Tracking and Analyzing Malfunctions Using Fault Trees

arXiv:2603.22978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the maintenance of complex systems, fault trees are used to locate problems and provide targeted solutions. To enable fault trees stored as images to be directly processed by large language models, which can assist in tracking and analyzing malfunctions, we propose a novel textual representation of fault trees. Building on it, we construct a benchmark for multi-turn dialogue systems that emphasizes robust interaction in complex environments, evaluating a model's ability to assist in malfunction localization, which contains $3130$ entries and $40.75$ turns per entry on average. We train an end-to-end model to generate vague information to reflect user behavior and introduce long-range rollback and recovery procedures to simulate user error scenarios, enabling assessment of a model's integrated capabilities in task tracking and error recovery, and Gemini 2.5 pro archives the best performance.
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