arXiv Machine Learning

Quality-Diversity Evolution for Discovering Diverse Vulnerabilities in LLM Safety

arXiv:2606. 00801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current approaches to LLM adversarial testing suffer from coverage gaps: manual red-teaming does not scale, LLM-as-attacker methods exhibit mode collapse, and gradient-based approaches produce uninterpretable gibberish.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Quality-Diversity Red-Teaming: Automated Generation of High-Quality and Diverse Attackers for Large Language Models

arXiv:2506. 07121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ensuring the safety and robustness of large language models (LLMs) is a fundamental challenge and a critical prerequisite for the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence.

By Ren-Jian Wang, Ke Xue, Zeyu Qin, Ziniu Li, Sheng Tang, Hao-Tian Li, Shengcai Liu, Zhi Yu, Yuanpeng Tan, Chao Qian
arXiv AI
Sep 2

EvoFlint: An Evolutionary Atlas of Multi-Turn LLM Vulnerabilities

EvoFlint is an evolutionary atlas that maps multi‑turn vulnerabilities in large language models by treating attack discovery as a search problem rather than a generation task. It uses evolutionary quality‑diversity search to evolve phased conversation plans, employing Pareto fitness for success rate and severity, novelty search for diversity, and a generation‑level memory to incorporate model insights. The resulting risk‑indexed archive, tested on HarmBench, shows high attack success rates across models such as Claude Sonnet, GPT‑5, and Qwen3, revealing which harm categories each model’s safety training covers or misses.

By Feitong Qiao, Liren Peng, Shiming Ren, Aishwarya Jadhav, Arghavan Bahadorinejad, Marinette Chen, Muhan Zhang, Abdulaziz Suria, Gennevi Lu, Anish Das Sarma
arXiv AI
Sep 1

T-MAP: Red-Teaming LLM Agents with Trajectory-aware Evolutionary Search

The paper introduces T-MAP, a trajectory‑aware evolutionary search technique designed to red‑team large language model agents by exploiting vulnerabilities that arise during multi‑step tool execution. Unlike traditional methods that focus on harmful text, T‑MAP uses execution trajectories to generate adversarial prompts that bypass safety guardrails and achieve harmful objectives through actual tool interactions. Experiments across various Model Context Protocol environments show that T‑MAP outperforms baseline methods in attack realization rate and remains effective against advanced models such as GPT‑5.2, Gemini‑3‑Pro, Qwen3.5, and GLM‑5.

By Hyomin Lee, Sangwoo Park, Yumin Choi, Sohyun An, Seanie Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
arXiv AI
Jun 4

TamperBench: Systematically Stress-Testing LLM Safety Under Fine-Tuning and Tampering

arXiv:2602. 06911v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As increasingly capable open-weight large language models (LLMs) are deployed, improving their tamper resistance against unsafe modifications, whether accidental or intentional, becomes critical to minimize risks.

By Saad Hossain, Tom Tseng, Punya Syon Pandey, Samanvay Vajpayee, Matthew Kowal, Nayeema Nonta, Samuel Simko, Stephen Casper, Zhijing Jin, Kellin Pelrine, Sirisha Rambhatla
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Are Frontier LLMs Ready for Cybersecurity? Evidence for Vertical Foundation Models from Dual-Mode Vulnerability Benchmarks

arXiv:2605. 23243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We evaluate whether frontier LLMs are ready for cybersecurity through a dual-mode benchmark: white-box function-level vulnerability detection (VulnLLM-R, across C/Java/Python) and black-box web application security testing (five production-style applications with 118 ground-truth vulnerabilities across 20+ CWE families, which we will open-source).

By Vivek Dahiya, Sunny Nehra, Vipul Dholariya, Bhavik Shangari, Chandra Khatri
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Detecting Data Poisoning in Code Generation LLMs via Black-Box, Vulnerability-Oriented Scanning

The paper introduces CodeScan, a black-box, vulnerability-oriented scanning framework designed to detect data poisoning and backdoor attacks in code generation large language models (LLMs). CodeScan operates by analyzing structural similarities across multiple code generations, normalizing them with abstract syntax tree (AST) techniques, and then applying LLM-based vulnerability analysis to identify recurring insecure patterns. Evaluations on 117 models across three architectures and multiple sizes show over 97% detection accuracy with fewer false positives compared to prior methods.

By Shenao Yan, Shan Jin, Shimaa Ahmed, Sunpreet Singh Arora, Yiwei Cai, Yizhen Wang, Yuan Hong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

arXiv:2606. 03344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats.

By Jinghuai Zhang, Yetian He, Kunlin Cai, Han Zhao, Fnu Suya, Yuan Tian