Computational Safety for Generative AI: A Signal Processing Perspective

AI safety is a rapidly growing area of research that seeks to prevent the harm and misuse of frontier AI technology, particularly with respect to generative AI (GenAI) tools that are capable of creating realistic and high-quality content through text prompts. Examples of such tools include large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. As the performance of various leading GenAI models approaches saturation due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture designs, the development of reliable safety guardrails has become a key differentiator for responsibility and sustainability. This paper presents a formalization of the concept of computational safety, which is a mathematical framework that enables the quantitative assessment, formulation, and study of safety challenges in GenAI through the lens of signal processing theory and methods. In particular, we explore two exemplary categories of computational safety challenges in GenAI that can be formulated as hypothesis testing problems. For the safety of model input, we show how sensitivity analysis and loss landscape analysis can be used to detect malicious prompts with jailbreak attempts. For the safety of model output, we elucidate how statistical signal processing and adversarial learning can be used to detect AI-generated content. Finally, we discuss key open research challenges, opportunities, and the essential role of signal processing in computational AI safety. Signal processing has played a pivotal role in ensuring the stability, security, and efficiency of numerous engineering systems and information technologies, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, information forensics and security, machine learning, data science, and control systems. With the recent advances, wide accessibility, and deep integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools into our society and technology, such as ChatGPT and the emerging agentic AI applications, understanding and mitigating the associated risks of the so-called "frontier AI technology" is essential to ensure a responsible and sustainable use of GenAI. In addition, as the performance of state-ofthe-art GanAI models surpasses that of an average human in certain tasks, but reaches a plateau in standardized capability evaluation benchmarks due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture design (e.g., the use of decoder-only transformers), improving and ensuring safety is becoming the new arms race among GenAI stakeholders. EU AI Act, AI safety institutes, etc.), there are growing concerns about the broader socio-technical impacts [1].