# Depending on yourself when you should: Mentoring LLM with RL agents to become the master in cybersecurity games

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17674/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12931/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model (LLM) Security and Privacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02003/) (2023)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration: Harnessing the Power of Intelligent LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03314/) (2023)
- [Reward Design with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00001/) (2023)
- [Self-collaboration Code Generation via ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07590/) (2023)
- [Exploring Large Language Models for Communication Games: An Empirical Study on Werewolf](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04658/) (2023)
- [Exploring Collaboration Mechanisms for LLM Agents: A Social Psychology View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02124/) (2023)
- [Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13788/) (2023)
- [JARVIS-1: Open-World Multi-task Agents with Memory-Augmented Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05997/) (2023)
- [SwiftSage: A Generative Agent with Fast and Slow Thinking for Complex Interactive Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17390/) (2023)
- [Examining Zero-Shot Vulnerability Repair with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02125/) (2021)
- [PentestGPT: An LLM-empowered Automatic Penetration Testing Tool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06782/) (2023)
- [Lost at C: A User Study on the Security Implications of Large Language Model Code Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09727/) (2022)
- [Humanoid Agents: Platform for Simulating Human-like Generative Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05418/) (2023)
- [Collaborating with language models for embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00763/) (2023)
- [CybORG: A Gym for the Development of Autonomous Cyber Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09118/) (2021)
- [Enabling Intelligent Interactions between an Agent and an LLM: A Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03604/) (2023)
- [HuntGPT: Integrating Machine Learning-Based Anomaly Detection and Explainable AI with Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16021/) (2023)
- [EAGER: Asking and Answering Questions for Automatic Reward Shaping in Language-guided RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09674/) (2022)
- [Decoding the Threat Landscape : ChatGPT, FraudGPT, and WormGPT in Social Engineering Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05595/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Models Find And Fix Vulnerable Software?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10345/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Cut the Crap: An Economical Communication Pipeline for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02506/) (2024)
- [G-Designer: Architecting Multi-agent Communication Topologies via Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11782/) (2024)
- [VulnBot: Autonomous Penetration Testing for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13411/) (2025)
- [Internet of Agents: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07176/) (2025)
- [AnyMAC: Cascading Flexible Multi-Agent Collaboration via Next-Agent Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17784/) (2025)
- [MetaAgent: Automatically Constructing Multi-Agent Systems Based on Finite State Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22606/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models are Autonomous Cyber Defenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04843/) (2025)
- [Optimal Defender Strategies for CAGE-2 using Causal Modeling and Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11070/) (2024)
- [Incident Response Planning Using a Lightweight Large Language Model with Reduced Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05188/) (2025)
- [Live-Evo: Online Evolution of Agentic Memory from Continuous Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02369/) (2026)
- [EVA: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Video Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22918/) (2026)
- [A Short Survey on Small Reasoning Models: Training, Inference, Applications and Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09100/) (2025)
- [In-Context Autonomous Network Incident Response: An End-to-End Large Language Model Agent Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13156/) (2026)
- [ARCeR: an Agentic RAG for the Automated Definition of Cyber Ranges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12143/) (2025)
- [Evaluating the Quality of Randomness and Entropy in Tasks Supported by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12080/) (2025)
- [Countering Autonomous Cyber Threats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18312/) (2024)
- [Hallucination-Resistant Security Planning with a Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05279/) (2026)
- [Agentic Incident Response through Digital Twin-Enhanced Multiscale Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02422/) (2026)
- [COHORT: Collaborative Orchestration for Hardening via Offensive Replay on Emulated Topologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30479/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Multi-Agent Collaboration: When More Is Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19759/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Integrating LLM and reinforcement learning (RL) agent effectively to achieve complementary performance is critical in high stake tasks like cybersecurity operations. In this study, we introduce SecurityBot, a LLM agent mentored by pre-trained RL agents, to support cybersecurity operations. In particularly, the LLM agent is supported with a profile module to generated behavior guidelines, a memory module to accumulate local experiences, a reflection module to re-evaluate choices, and an action module to reduce action space. Additionally, it adopts the collaboration mechanism to take suggestions from pre-trained RL agents, including a cursor for dynamic suggestion taken, an aggregator for multiple mentors' suggestions ranking and a caller for proactive suggestion asking. Building on the CybORG experiment framework, our experiences show that SecurityBot demonstrates significant performance improvement compared with LLM or RL standalone, achieving the complementary performance in the cybersecurity games.