English

Online Safety Monitoring for LLMs

Artificial Intelligence 2026-07-02 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning Applications Machine Learning

Abstract

Despite alignment training, LLMs remain prone to generating unsafe outputs at deployment time. Monitoring outputs online and raising an alarm when safety can no longer be assumed is therefore critical. We study a simple real-time monitor that turns a verifier signal from an external model into an alarm decision by thresholding, with the threshold calibrated via risk control. In experiments on mathematical reasoning and red teaming datasets, we show that this simple design is competitive with more advanced monitors based on sequential hypothesis testing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.02510,
  title  = {Online Safety Monitoring for LLMs},
  author = {Mona Schirmer and Metod Jazbec and Alexander Timans and Christian Naesseth and Maja Waldron and Eric Nalisnick},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.02510},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

ICML 2026 Hypothesis Testing Workshop