# Ferret: Faster and Effective Automated Red Teaming with Reward-Based Scoring Technique

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10701/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 10 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/safety-alignment-and-jailbreak-attacks/)
- LLM safety and security / [Prompt injection and agent security](https://mlsanity.com/safety/prompt-injection-and-agent-security/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02119/) (2023)
- [Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14375/) (2022)
- [ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11753/) (2024)
- [Scalable and Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks for Language Models via Persona Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03348/) (2023)
- [Rainbow Teaming: Open-Ended Generation of Diverse Adversarial Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16822/) (2024)
- [MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07689/) (2023)
- [Ruby Teaming: Improving Quality Diversity Search with Memory for Automated Red Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11654/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [RainbowPlus: Enhancing Adversarial Prompt Generation via Evolutionary Quality-Diversity Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15047/) (2025)
- [Quality-Diversity Red-Teaming: Automated Generation of High-Quality and Diverse Attackers for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07121/) (2025)
- [PersonaTeaming: Exploring How Introducing Personas Can Improve Automated AI Red-Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03728/) (2025)
- [Recent advancements in LLM Red-Teaming: Techniques, Defenses, and Ethical Considerations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09097/) (2024)
- [The Trojan Knowledge: Bypassing Commercial LLM Guardrails via Harmless Prompt Weaving and Adaptive Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01353/) (2025)
- [ARES: Adaptive Red-Teaming and End-to-End Repair of Policy-Reward System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18789/) (2026)
- [One Turn Too Late: Learning When to Intervene Against Multi-Turn Malicious Intent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05630/) (2026)
- [PersonaTeaming: Supporting Persona-Driven Red-Teaming for Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05682/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In today's era, where large language models (LLMs) are integrated into numerous real-world applications, ensuring their safety and robustness is crucial for responsible AI usage. Automated red-teaming methods play a key role in this process by generating adversarial attacks to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities in these models. However, existing methods often struggle with slow performance, limited categorical diversity, and high resource demands. While Rainbow Teaming, a recent approach, addresses the diversity challenge by framing adversarial prompt generation as a quality-diversity search, it remains slow and requires a large fine-tuned mutator for optimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Ferret, a novel approach that builds upon Rainbow Teaming by generating multiple adversarial prompt mutations per iteration and using a scoring function to rank and select the most effective adversarial prompt. We explore various scoring functions, including reward models, Llama Guard, and LLM-as-a-judge, to rank adversarial mutations based on their potential harm to improve the efficiency of the search for harmful mutations. Our results demonstrate that Ferret, utilizing a reward model as a scoring function, improves the overall attack success rate (ASR) to 95%, which is 46% higher than Rainbow Teaming. Additionally, Ferret reduces the time needed to achieve a 90% ASR by 15.2% compared to the baseline and generates adversarial prompts that are transferable i.e. effective on other LLMs of larger size. Our codes are available at https://github.com/declare-lab/ferret.