Tanush Swaminathan
Author directory2026
SciTrace: Trajectory-Aware Safety Reasoning for Scientific Discovery Agents
Tanush Swaminathan | Runmin Jiang | Letian Zhang | Min Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Tanush Swaminathan | Runmin Jiang | Letian Zhang | Min Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
LLM-based scientific agents have shown strong capacity for autonomous research, yet their safety layers remain structurally divorced from core reasoning: they inspect pipeline outputs rather than shaping the deliberation that produces them. This separation opens two failure modes: safety signals accumulated at one stage are discarded before the next, and sequences of individually benign tool calls can compose into harmful outcomes that no single-step filter detects. To address these challenges, we introduce **SciTrace**, a framework that weaves safety reasoning into every stage of the scientific agent pipeline. SciTrace couples two complementary mechanisms: a *Safety-Intrinsic Reasoning Loop* (SIR) that maintains a cumulative risk state across the Thinker, Experimenter, Writer, and Reviewer stages through joint task-and-safety deliberation, and a *Compositional Tool-Chain Verifier* (CTV) that performs trajectory-aware safety checks before execution, catching risks that surface only across multi-step tool sequences. Evaluated on 240 high-risk research tasks and 120 tool-related risk tasks spanning six scientific domains, SciTrace achieves state-of-the-art (**SOTA**) safety among compared frameworks across four backbone models: it consistently improves tool call safety and adversarial robustness while preserving scientific output quality, and it uncovers **78.8%** of the compositional tool-chain escapes that single-step monitors miss. The project website is available at [https://opensciagent.github.io/SciTrace/](https://opensciagent.github.io/SciTrace/).