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arXiv · 2601.10156

ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback

Yutao Mou·Zhangchi Xue·Lijun Li·Peiyang Liu·Shikun Zhang·Wei Ye·Jing Shao
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Abstract

While LLM-based agents can interact with environments via invoking external tools, their expanded capabilities also amplify security risks. Monitoring step-level tool invocation behaviors in real time and proactively intervening before unsafe execution is critical for agent deployment, yet remains under-explored. In this work, we first construct TS-Bench, a novel benchmark for step-level tool invocation safety detection in LLM agents. We then develop a guardrail model, TS-Guard, using multi-task reinforcement learning. The model proactively detects unsafe tool invocation actions before execution by reasoning over the interaction history. It assesses request harmfulness and action-attack correlations, producing interpretable and generalizable safety judgments and feedback. Furthermore, we introduce TS-Flow, a guardrail-feedback-driven reasoning framework for LLM agents, which reduces harmful tool invocations of ReAct-style agents by 65 percent on average and improves benign task completion by approximately 10 percent under prompt injection attacks.

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Yutao Mou, Zhangchi Xue, Lijun Li, Peiyang Liu, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye, Jing Shao. 2026-01-15. ToolSafe: Enhancing Tool Invocation Safety of LLM-based agents via Proactive Step-level Guardrail and Feedback. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10156

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