LABSHIELD: A Multimodal Benchmark for Safety-Critical Reasoning and Planning in Scientific Laboratories
This addresses safety-critical reasoning for autonomous scientific experimentation, but it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking rather than proposing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of insufficient safety awareness and decision-making reliability of multimodal large language model agents in scientific laboratories by introducing LABSHIELD, a benchmark for hazard identification and safety-critical reasoning, revealing a 32.0% average performance drop in professional scenarios.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly catalyzing scientific automation, with multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents evolving from lab assistants into self-driving lab operators. This transition imposes stringent safety requirements on laboratory environments, where fragile glassware, hazardous substances, and high-precision laboratory equipment render planning errors or misinterpreted risks potentially irreversible. However, the safety awareness and decision-making reliability of embodied agents in such high-stakes settings remain insufficiently defined and evaluated. To bridge this gap, we introduce LABSHIELD, a realistic multi-view benchmark designed to assess MLLMs in hazard identification and safety-critical reasoning. Grounded in U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards and the Globally Harmonized System (GHS), LABSHIELD establishes a rigorous safety taxonomy spanning 164 operational tasks with diverse manipulation complexities and risk profiles. We evaluate 20 proprietary models, 9 open-source models, and 3 embodied models under a dual-track evaluation framework. Our results reveal a systematic gap between general-domain MCQ accuracy and Semi-open QA safety performance, with models exhibiting an average drop of 32.0% in professional laboratory scenarios, particularly in hazard interpretation and safety-aware planning. These findings underscore the urgent necessity for safety-centric reasoning frameworks to ensure reliable autonomous scientific experimentation in embodied laboratory contexts. The full dataset will be released soon.