[2603.01589] SafeSci: Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models in Science Domains and Beyond

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2603.01589 (cs) [Submitted on 2 Mar 2026] Title:SafeSci: Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models in Science Domains and Beyond Authors:Xiangyang Zhu, Yuan Tian, Qi Jia, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Chunyi Li, Kaiyuan Ji, Dongrui Liu, Zijian Chen, Lu Sun, Renrui Zhang, Yan Teng, Jing Shao, Wei Sun, Xia Hu, Yu Qiao, Guangtao Zhai View a PDF of the paper titled SafeSci: Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models in Science Domains and Beyond, by Xiangyang Zhu and 16 other authors View PDF Abstract:The success of large language models (LLMs) in scientific domains has heightened safety concerns, prompting numerous benchmarks to evaluate their scientific safety. Existing benchmarks often suffer from limited risk coverage and a reliance on subjective evaluation. To address these problems, we introduce SafeSci, a comprehensive framework for safety evaluation and enhancement in scientific contexts. SafeSci comprises SafeSciBench, a multi-disciplinary benchmark with 0.25M samples, and SafeSciTrain, a large-scale dataset containing 1.5M samples for safety enhancement. SafeSciBench distinguishes between safety knowledge and risk to cover extensive scopes and employs objective metrics such as deterministically answerable questions to mitigate evaluation bias. We evaluate 24 advanced LLMs, revealing critical vulnerabilities in current models. We also observe that LLMs exhibit varying degrees of excessive refusal behaviors on safety-related is...