AutoRedTeamer: Autonomous Red Teaming with Lifelong Attack Integration

Bo Li (Nanjing University) · Sanmi Koyejo (Stanford University / Virtue AI) · Zhaorun Chen (University of Chicago) · Francesco Pinto (University of Chicago) · Yi Zeng (ByteDance Inc.) · Andy Zhou (Intology) · Kevin Wu (Stanford University) · Yu Yang (Zhejiang University) · Shuang Yang (Facebook) · James Zou (Stanford)
attack vectorsautomated frameworkcomputational costscontinuous discoverydual-agent frameworkemerging threatsevaluation settingsmemory-guided attack selectionmulti-agent architecturered teamingrisk categoriesstrategy proposer agenttest casesvulnerabilities

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, security and safety evaluation are crucial. While current red teaming approaches have made strides in assessing LLM vulnerabilities, they often rely heavily on human input and lack comprehensive coverage of emerging attack vectors. This paper introduces AutoRedTeamer, a novel framework for fully automated, end-to-end red teaming against LLMs. AutoRedTeamer combines a multi-agent architecture with a memory-guided attack selection mechanism to enable continuous discovery and integration of new attack vectors. The dual-agent framework consists of a red teaming agent that can operate from high-level risk categories alone to generate and execute test cases, and a strategy proposer agent that autonomously discovers and implements new attacks by analyzing recent research. This modular design allows AutoRedTeamer to adapt to emerging threats while maintaining strong performance on existing attack vectors. We demonstrate AutoRedTeamer’s effectiveness across diverse evaluation settings, achieving 20% higher attack success rates on HarmBench against Llama-3.1-70B while reducing computational costs by 46% compared to existing approaches. AutoRedTeamer also matches the diversity of human-curated benchmarks in generating test cases, providing a comprehensive, scalable, and continuously evolving framework for evaluating the security of AI systems.