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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.
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RedTopic: Toward Topic-Diverse Red Teaming of Large Language Models

arXiv:2507.00026v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as black-box components in real-world applications, red teaming has become essential for identifying potential risks. It tests LLMs with adversarial prompts to uncover vulnerabilities and improve safety alignment. Ideally, effective red teaming should be adaptive to evolving LLM capabilities and explore a broad range of harmful topics. However, existing approaches face two limitations: 1) topic-based approaches rely on pre-collected harmful topics, limited in flexibility and adaptivity. 2) topic-free methods use reinforcement learning (RL), but they lack an explicit reward signal for exploration and tend to over-optimize a narrow objective, reducing topic diversity. To address these limitations, we propose RedTopic, a novel red teaming framework that generates topic-diverse adversarial prompts through a contextualized generation pipeline, an aggregate reward design, and a multi-objective RL training loop. Experiments show that RedTopic produces more effective and diverse adversarial prompts than existing methods, with notable improvements in integrated evaluation metrics. We believe RedTopic represents a step toward more adaptive and topic-diverse red teaming for large language models.
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