Towards Safety Reasoning in LLMs: AI-agentic Deliberation for
  Policy-embedded CoT Data Creation
Authors: name: Tharindu Kumarage; name: Ninareh Mehrabi; name: Anil Ramakrishna; name: Xinyan Zhao; name: Richard Zemel; name: Kai-Wei Chang; name: Aram Galstyan; name: Rahul Gupta; name: Charith Peris
Published: 2025-05-27 21:34:40

Abstract: Safety reasoning is a recent paradigm where LLMs reason over safety policies
before generating responses, thereby mitigating limitations in existing safety
measures such as over-refusal and jailbreak vulnerabilities. However,
implementing this paradigm is challenging due to the resource-intensive process
of creating high-quality policy-embedded chain-of-thought (CoT) datasets while
ensuring reasoning remains accurate and free from hallucinations or policy
conflicts. To tackle this, we propose AIDSAFE: Agentic Iterative Deliberation
for Safety Reasoning, a novel data generation recipe that leverages multi-agent
deliberation to iteratively expand reasoning on safety policies. A data refiner
stage in AIDSAFE ensures high-quality outputs by eliminating repetitive,
redundant, and deceptive thoughts. AIDSAFE-generated CoTs provide a strong
foundation for supervised fine-tuning (SFT)-based safety training.
Additionally, to address the need of preference data in alignment stages, such
as DPO training, we introduce a supplemental recipe that uses belief
augmentation to create distinct selected and rejected CoT samples. Our
evaluations demonstrate that AIDSAFE-generated CoTs achieve superior policy
adherence and reasoning quality. Consequently, we show that fine-tuning
open-source LLMs on these CoTs can significantly improve safety generalization
and jailbreak robustness while maintaining acceptable utility and over-refusal
accuracy. AIDSAFE-generated CoT datasets can be found here:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/AmazonScience/AIDSAFE