AIMay 25
NEXUS: Structured Runtime Safety for Tool-Using LLM AgentsElias Hossain, Md Mehedi Hasan Nipu, Tasfia Nuzhat Ornee et al.
Tool-using LLM agents increasingly execute high-impact actions, making runtime safety monitoring essential. We present NEXUS (Neural EXecution Utility and Safety), a structured-plan safety monitor that applies a formal intervention policy to select among four actions: allow, block, request confirmation, or request revision. NEXUS combines deterministic safety rules, argument-level inspection, and a calibrated logistic-regression risk score for graded escalation. On a 128-instance synthetic benchmark, NEXUS achieves an F1 score of 0.949 and a 4-class intervention accuracy of 0.6406, outperforming rule-only intervention selection by 27.3 percentage points. It also improves over rule-only on R-Judge (F1 = 0.861 vs. 0.849), matches rule-only on AgentHarm due to threat-model limits, and achieves 0% ASR at 99% control allow on IPI. On the rule-blind NEXUS-Stress benchmark, NEXUS reaches an F1 score of 0.881, highlighting the difficulty of fine-grained intervention routing. With 0.205 ms median latency, NEXUS adds under 0.1% overhead to typical agent loops. Code, benchmarks, and the calibrated risk scorer are publicly released.
3.3AINov 20, 2025
MedBayes-Lite: Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification for Safe Clinical Decision SupportElias Hossain, Md Mehedi Hasan Nipu, Maleeha Sheikh et al.
We propose MedBayes-Lite, a lightweight Bayesian enhancement for transformer-based clinical language models designed to produce reliable, uncertainty-aware predictions. Although transformers show strong potential for clinical decision support, they remain prone to overconfidence, especially in ambiguous medical cases where calibrated uncertainty is critical. MedBayes-Lite embeds uncertainty quantification directly into existing transformer pipelines without any retraining or architectural rewiring, adding no new trainable layers and keeping parameter overhead under 3 percent. The framework integrates three components: (i) Bayesian Embedding Calibration using Monte Carlo dropout for epistemic uncertainty, (ii) Uncertainty-Weighted Attention that marginalizes over token reliability, and (iii) Confidence-Guided Decision Shaping inspired by clinical risk minimization. Across biomedical QA and clinical prediction benchmarks (MedQA, PubMedQA, MIMIC-III), MedBayes-Lite consistently improves calibration and trustworthiness, reducing overconfidence by 32 to 48 percent. In simulated clinical settings, it can prevent up to 41 percent of diagnostic errors by flagging uncertain predictions for human review. These results demonstrate its effectiveness in enabling reliable uncertainty propagation and improving interpretability in medical AI systems.