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EARBench: Towards Evaluating Physical Risk Awareness for Task Planning of Foundation Model-based Embodied AI Agents

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arxiv 2408.04449 v5 pith:BFKHX32C submitted 2024-08-08 cs.AI

EARBench: Towards Evaluating Physical Risk Awareness for Task Planning of Foundation Model-based Embodied AI Agents

classification cs.AI
keywords riskmodelssafetyphysicalagentsfoundationtaskawareness
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Embodied artificial intelligence (EAI) integrates advanced AI models into physical entities for real-world interaction. The emergence of foundation models as the "brain" of EAI agents for high-level task planning has shown promising results. However, the deployment of these agents in physical environments presents significant safety challenges. For instance, a housekeeping robot lacking sufficient risk awareness might place a metal container in a microwave, potentially causing a fire. To address these critical safety concerns, comprehensive pre-deployment risk assessments are imperative. This study introduces EARBench, a novel framework for automated physical risk assessment in EAI scenarios. EAIRiskBench employs a multi-agent cooperative system that leverages various foundation models to generate safety guidelines, create risk-prone scenarios, make task planning, and evaluate safety systematically. Utilizing this framework, we construct EARDataset, comprising diverse test cases across various domains, encompassing both textual and visual scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art foundation models reveals alarming results: all models exhibit high task risk rates (TRR), with an average of 95.75% across all evaluated models. To address these challenges, we further propose two prompting-based risk mitigation strategies. While these strategies demonstrate some efficacy in reducing TRR, the improvements are limited, still indicating substantial safety concerns. This study provides the first large-scale assessment of physical risk awareness in EAI agents. Our findings underscore the critical need for enhanced safety measures in EAI systems and provide valuable insights for future research directions in developing safer embodied artificial intelligence system. Data and code are available at https://github.com/zihao-ai/EARBench.

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Cited by 14 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  3. When Words Are Safe But Actions Kill: Probing Physical Danger Beyond Text Safety in Hidden-State Risk Space

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Content danger and physical danger form separable hidden-state signals in LLMs, and a single-layer logistic probe (PRISM) detects both at lower false-positive rates than LLM judges or text guardrails.

  4. Self-Evolving Just-In-Time Memory for Proactive Embodied Safety

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    A Just-In-Time Memory framework with graph-based state tracking and self-evolving safety skills improves safe task completion in household robots by up to 30 percentage points on IS-Bench.

  5. Benchmarking the Safety of Large Language Models for Robotic Health Attendant Control

    cs.AI 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

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    cs.AI 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0

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    cs.RO 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0

    LLM-generated robot policy code is unreliable, with failures clustering into four behavior types that grow with task complexity and shrink with instruction detail; a failure-feedback retry improves success up to 35%.

  9. Harnessing Embodied Agents: Runtime Governance for Policy-Constrained Execution

    cs.RO 2026-04 conditional novelty 5.5

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    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

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  12. Context-Aware Risk Estimation in Home Environments: A Probabilistic Framework for Service Robots

    cs.RO 2025-08 reject novelty 5.0

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  13. Towards provable probabilistic safety for scalable embodied AI systems

    eess.SY 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

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  14. Toward Secure LLM Agents: Threat Surfaces, Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluation

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