SoSBench: Benchmarking Safety Alignment on Six Scientific Domains

Understand

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit advancing capabilities in complex tasks, such as reasoning and graduate-level question answering, yet their resilience against misuse, particularly involving scientifically sophisticated risks, remains underexplored.

• Existing safety benchmarks typically focus either on instructions requiring minimal knowledge comprehension (e.g., ``tell me how to build a bomb") or utilize prompts that are relatively low-risk (e.g., multiple-choice or classification tasks about hazardous content).
• Consequently, they fail to adequately assess model safety when handling knowledge-intensive, hazardous scenarios.
• To address this critical gap, we introduce SoSBench, a regulation-grounded, hazard-focused benchmark encompassing six high-risk scientific domains: chemistry, biology, medicine, pharmacology, physics, and psychology.