Visual Compliance via Executable Safety Rule Entailment

Jisoo Kim, TaeYoon Kwack, Jinwoo Jang, Honguk Woo


Abstract
Recent advances in LLMs and VLMs have enabled safety systems to reason beyond simple risk patterns toward more contextual and semantic safety concerns. However, as risk patterns continue to evolve and safety rules become more complex, existing training-based end-to-end safeguards face persistent challenges in adaptability and explainable reasoning over complex safety rules. To address these challenges, we propose GuardEn (Guarding by Safety Rule Entailment), an executable safeguard framework that decomposes safety policies into atomic propositions through Safety-Rule Compilation, modeling their composition as executable code. At test time, Scene-Grounded Execution instantiates these atomic propositions with contextual visual information derived from scene graphs, enabling rule-grounded and interpretable safety reasoning. Experiments on SafetyVisionBench demonstrate the effectiveness of programmable safeguard for complex visual safety assessment, achieving an average improvement of 9.8 F1 points over the strongest baseline across four domains.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1061
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24356–24391
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1061/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jisoo Kim, TaeYoon Kwack, Jinwoo Jang, and Honguk Woo. 2026. Visual Compliance via Executable Safety Rule Entailment. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 24356–24391, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Visual Compliance via Executable Safety Rule Entailment (Kim et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1061.pdf