# MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07689 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07689/

## Key facts

- Cited by 163 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt injection and agent security, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 18 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Prompt injection and agent security](https://mlsanity.com/safety/prompt-injection-and-agent-security/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07327/) (2023)
- [Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Do](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11790/) (2021)
- [Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06083/) (2019)
- [Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07079/) (2020)
- [FLIRT: Feedback Loop In-context Red Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04265/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 163)

- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [OR-Bench: An Over-Refusal Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20947/) (2024)
- [Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04295/) (2024)
- [ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11753/) (2024)
- [Rainbow Teaming: Open-Ended Generation of Diverse Adversarial Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16822/) (2024)
- [LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15221/) (2024)
- [Attacks, Defenses and Evaluations for LLM Conversation Safety: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09283/) (2024)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [Fast Adversarial Attacks on Language Models In One GPU Minute](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15570/) (2024)
- [Red-Teaming for Generative AI: Silver Bullet or Security Theater?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15897/) (2024)
- [FlipAttack: Jailbreak LLMs via Flipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02832/) (2024)
- [Towards Conversational Diagnostic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05654/) (2024)
- [Safeguarding Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02622/) (2024)
- [The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18682/) (2024)
- [JailbreakZoo: Survey, Landscapes, and Horizons in Jailbreaking Large Language and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01599/) (2024)
- [Uncovering Safety Risks of Large Language Models through Concept Activation Vector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12038/) (2024)
- [Refusal-Trained LLMs Are Easily Jailbroken As Browser Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13886/) (2024)
- [AdvAgent: Controllable Blackbox Red-teaming on Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17401/) (2024)
- [Foot-In-The-Door: A Multi-turn Jailbreak for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19820/) (2025)
- [Bypassing the Safety Training of Open-Source LLMs with Priming Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12321/) (2023)
- [A Safe Harbor for AI Evaluation and Red Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04893/) (2024)
- [ALI-Agent: Assessing LLMs' Alignment with Human Values via Agent-based Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14125/) (2024)
- [Operationalizing a Threat Model for Red-Teaming Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14937/) (2024)
- [Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21206/) (2025)
- [AutoRedTeamer: Autonomous Red Teaming with Lifelong Attack Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15754/) (2025)
- [Securing Large Language Models: Threats, Vulnerabilities and Responsible Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12503/) (2024)
- [ART: Automatic Red-teaming for Text-to-Image Models to Protect Benign Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19360/) (2024)
- [MTSA: Multi-turn Safety Alignment for LLMs through Multi-round Red-teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17147/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Visual Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10501/) (2024)
- [JailbreakEval: An Integrated Toolkit for Evaluating Jailbreak Attempts Against Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09321/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Red-teaming is a common practice for mitigating unsafe behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs), which involves thoroughly assessing LLMs to identify potential flaws and addressing them with responsible and accurate responses. While effective, manual red-teaming is costly, and existing automatic red-teaming typically discovers safety risks without addressing them. In this paper, we propose a Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming (MART) method, which incorporates both automatic adversarial prompt writing and safe response generation, significantly increasing red-teaming scalability and the safety of the target LLM. Specifically, an adversarial LLM and a target LLM interplay with each other in an iterative manner, where the adversarial LLM aims to generate challenging prompts that elicit unsafe responses from the target LLM, while the target LLM is fine-tuned with safety aligned data on these adversarial prompts. In each round, the adversarial LLM crafts better attacks on the updated target LLM, while the target LLM also improves itself through safety fine-tuning. On adversarial prompt benchmarks, the violation rate of an LLM with limited safety alignment reduces up to 84.7% after 4 rounds of MART, achieving comparable performance to LLMs with extensive adversarial prompt writing. Notably, model helpfulness on non-adversarial prompts remains stable throughout iterations, indicating the target LLM maintains strong performance on instruction following.
