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Tree-based Dialogue Reinforced Policy Optimization for Red-Teaming Attacks

arXiv:2510.02286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite recent rapid progress in AI safety, current large language models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks in multi-turn interaction settings, where attackers strategically adapt their prompts across conversation turns and pose a more critical yet realistic challenge. Existing approaches that discover safety vulnerabilities either rely on manual red-teaming with human experts or employ automated methods using pre-defined templates and human-curated attack data, with most focusing on single-turn attacks. However, these methods did not explore the vast space of possible multi-turn attacks, failing to consider novel attack trajectories that emerge from complex dialogue dynamics and strategic conversation planning. This gap is particularly critical given recent findings that LLMs exhibit significantly higher vulnerability to multi-turn attacks compared to single-turn attacks. We propose DialTree, an on-policy reinforcement learning framework integrated with tree search that autonomously discovers diverse multi-turn attack strategies by treating the dialogue as a sequential decision-making problem, enabling systematic exploration without manually curated data. Through extensive experiments, our approach not only achieves more than 44.2% higher ASR across 12 target models compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, but also effectively uncovers new attack strategies by learning optimal dialogue policies that maximize attack success across multiple turns.

The Illusion of Human AI Parity Under Uncertainty: Navigating Elusive Ground Truth via a Probabilistic Paradigm

arXiv:2601.05500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmarking the relative capabilities of AI systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Models, typically ignores the impact of uncertainty in the underlying ground truth answers from experts. This ambiguity is not just limited to human preferences, but is also consequential even in safety critical domains such as medicine where uncertainty is pervasive. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic paradigm to theoretically explain how - high certainty in ground truth answers is almost always necessary for even an expert to achieve high scores, whereas in datasets with high variation in ground truth answers there may be little difference between a random labeller and an expert. Therefore, ignoring uncertainty in ground truth evaluation data can result in the misleading conclusion that a non-expert has similar performance to that of an expert. Using the probabilistic paradigm, we thus bring forth the concepts of expected accuracy and expected F1 to estimate the score an expert human or system can achieve given ground truth answer variability. Our work leads to the recommendation that when establishing the capability of a system, results should be stratified by probability of the ground truth answer, typically measured by the agreement rate of ground truth experts. Stratification becomes critical when the overall performance drops below a threshold of 80\%. Under stratified evaluation, performance comparison becomes more reliable in high certainty bins, mitigating the effect of the key confounding factor -- uncertainty.
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