Evolve the Method, Not the Prompts: Evolutionary Synthesis of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs
On the map: LLM safety and security → Prompt injection and agent security
Abstract (arXiv)
Automated red teaming frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly sophisticated, yet many still formulate attack optimization primarily in the prompt space. In other words, these methods mainly search for better attack wording or better strategy choices, but they do not search over executable code. By moving the search into code space, we can optimize not only the final attack prompt, but also the procedure that generates it, including execution flow, reusable logic, branching, and failure-driven repair. To overcome this gap, we introduce EvoSynth, an autonomous multi-agent framework that shifts the optimization space from prompts to executable code. Instead of refining prompts directly, EvoSynth employs a multi-agent system to autonomously engineer, evolve, and execute code-based attack algorithms. Crucially, it features a code-level self-correction loop, allowing it to iteratively rewrite the code-based algorithm in response to target-model feedback and failed attempts. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that EvoSynth achieves an 85.5% Attack Success Rate (ASR) against highly robust models like Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and a 95.9% average ASR across evaluated targets, while generating attacks that are significantly more diverse than those from existing methods. We release our framework to facilitate future research on evolutionary synthesis in executable code space.
Key facts. Cited by 8 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 57 of its 82 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2025.
Builds on
57 of 82 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
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- 2024RedAgent: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Context-aware Autonomous Language Agent23 Jul
- 2024Rainbow Teaming: Open-Ended Generation of Diverse Adversarial Prompts26 Feb
- 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal6 Feb
- 2022Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned23 Aug
- 2022Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models7 Feb
Other references · 50
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026OpenRT: An Open-Source Red Teaming Framework for Multimodal LLMscited by 21
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- 2026AJAR: Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teamingcited by 1
- 2026CONTRA: Red-Teaming Configurations of Personalizable Agentscited by 1
- 2026TAME: Test-Time Adversarial Prompt Tuning via Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Automatic Hard Example Synthesis with Multi-Level Agentic Data Curationcited by 0
- 2026OpenART: Scaling Agent Red Teaming via Open-Ended Environment Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026OpenART: Scaling Agent Red Teaming via Open-Ended Environment Evolution1 Aug 2026
- 2026Automatic Hard Example Synthesis with Multi-Level Agentic Data Curation15 Jul 2026
- 2026CONTRA: Red-Teaming Configurations of Personalizable Agents3 Jul 2026
- 2026SentGuard: Sentence-Level Streaming Guardrails for Large Language Models1 Jun 2026
- 2026TAME: Test-Time Adversarial Prompt Tuning via Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language Models17 May 2026
- 2026AgenticRed: Evolving Agentic Systems for Red-Teaming20 Jan 2026
- 2026AJAR: Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teaming16 Jan 2026
- 2026OpenRT: An Open-Source Red Teaming Framework for Multimodal LLMs4 Jan 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2025Genesis: Evolving Attack Strategies for LLM Web Agent Red-Teaming
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- 2025From LLMs to MLLMs to Agents: A Survey of Emerging Paradigms in Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses within LLM Ecosystem