mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

OpenRT: An Open-Source Red Teaming Framework for Multimodal LLMs

arXiv 2601.01592 ↗First posted 4 Jan 2026cs.CR cs.CVcited by 18

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness

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Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into critical applications is increasingly hindered by persistent safety vulnerabilities. However, existing red-teaming benchmarks are often fragmented, limited to single-turn text interactions, and lack the scalability required for systematic evaluation. To address this, we introduce OpenRT, a unified, modular, and high-throughput red-teaming framework designed for comprehensive MLLM safety evaluation. At its core, OpenRT architects a paradigm shift in automated red-teaming by introducing an adversarial kernel that enables modular separation across five critical dimensions: model integration, dataset management, attack strategies, judging methods, and evaluation metrics. By standardizing attack interfaces, it decouples adversarial logic from a high-throughput asynchronous runtime, enabling systematic scaling across diverse models. Our framework integrates 37 diverse attack methodologies, spanning white-box gradients, multi-modal perturbations, and sophisticated multi-agent evolutionary strategies. Through an extensive empirical study on 20 advanced models (including GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro), we expose critical safety gaps: even frontier models fail to generalize across attack paradigms, with leading models exhibiting average Attack Success Rates as high as 49.14%. Notably, our findings reveal that reasoning models do not inherently possess superior robustness against complex, multi-turn jailbreaks. By open-sourcing OpenRT, we provide a sustainable, extensible, and continuously maintained infrastructure that accelerates the development and standardization of AI safety.

Key facts. Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in MLLM jailbreaks and adversarial robustness, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 54 of its 110 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2026.

Builds on

54 of 110 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safety2 Feb
  2. 2023MM-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models29 Nov

Other references · 52

  1. 2017Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attackscited by 6,326
  2. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  3. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  4. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 2,950
  5. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 2,914
  6. 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusalcited by 1,330
  7. 2023Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversationscited by 1,124
  8. 2022Red Teaming Language Models with Language Modelscited by 983
  9. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 755
  10. 2022Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learnedcited by 702
  11. 2023Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automaticallycited by 619
  12. 2025Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligencecited by 523
38 more
  1. 2023GPTFUZZER: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Auto-Generated Jailbreak Promptscited by 520
  2. 2023Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Studycited by 478
  3. 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learningcited by 439
  4. 2023Jailbreak and Guard Aligned Language Models with Only Few In-Context Demonstrationscited by 401
  5. 2023DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreakercited by 337
  6. 2023Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Modelscited by 222
  7. 2023Sociotechnical Safety Evaluation of Generative AI Systemscited by 154
  8. 2024LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yetcited by 145
  9. 2025Qwen3Guard Technical Reportcited by 125
  10. 2025X-Teaming: Multi-Turn Jailbreaks and Defenses with Adaptive Multi-Agentscited by 112
  11. 2024Attacking Large Language Models with Projected Gradient Descentcited by 91
  12. 2024DrAttack: Prompt Decomposition and Reconstruction Makes Powerful LLM Jailbreakerscited by 91
  13. 2024LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shiftscited by 80
  14. 2024Chain of Attack: a Semantic-Driven Contextual Multi-Turn attacker for LLMcited by 73
  15. 2024FlipAttack: Jailbreak LLMs via Flippingcited by 73
  16. 2025Reasoning-Augmented Conversation for Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 61
  17. 2025A Survey of LLM-based Deep Search Agents: Paradigm, Optimization, Evaluation, and Challengescited by 58
  18. 2024EasyJailbreak: A Unified Framework for Jailbreaking Large Language Modelscited by 57
  19. 2024Distract Large Language Models for Automatic Jailbreak Attackcited by 40
  20. 2024RedAgent: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Context-aware Autonomous Language Agentcited by 39
  21. 2025Safety is Not Only About Refusal: Reasoning-Enhanced Fine-tuning for Interpretable LLM Safetycited by 38
  22. 2025AutoRedTeamer: Autonomous Red Teaming with Lifelong Attack Integrationcited by 38
  23. 2024PyRIT: A Framework for Security Risk Identification and Red Teaming in Generative AI Systemcited by 29
  24. 2024h4rm3l: A language for Composable Jailbreak Attack Synthesiscited by 23
  25. 2025FreezeVLA: Action-Freezing Attacks against Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 19
  26. 2025SafeWork-R1: Coevolving Safety and Intelligence under the AI-45circ Lawcited by 13
  27. 2025Conversational AI as a Coding Assistant: Understanding Programmers' Interactions with and Expectations from Large Language Models for Codingcited by 11
  28. 2025OmniSafeBench-MM: A Unified Benchmark and Toolbox for Multimodal Jailbreak Attack-Defense Evaluationcited by 10
  29. 2019A Reinforced Generation of Adversarial Examples for Neural Machine Translationcited by 9
  30. 2025Prefill-level Jailbreak: A Black-Box Risk Analysis of Large Language Modelscited by 9
  31. 2025AgenticEval: Toward Agentic and Self-Evolving Safety Evaluation of Large Language Modelscited by 9
  32. 2024LLM-Virus: Evolutionary Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Modelscited by 7
  33. 2025Evolve the Method, Not the Prompts: Evolutionary Synthesis of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMscited by 7
  34. 2025TeleAI-Safety: A comprehensive LLM jailbreaking benchmark towards attacks, defenses, and evaluationscited by 7
  35. 2025Sysformer: Safeguarding Frozen Large Language Models with Adaptive System Promptscited by 5
  36. 2025Evo-MARL: Co-Evolutionary Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Internalized Safetycited by 4
  37. 2024Self and Cross-Model Distillation for LLMs: Effective Methods for Refusal Pattern Alignmentcited by 3
  38. 2025Imperceptible Jailbreaking against Large Language Modelscited by 3

50 most cited of 52 All 52 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 18.

18 papers.

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  1. 2026MAGIC: A Co-Evolving Attacker-Defender Adversarial Game for Robust LLM Safetycited by 15
  2. 2026AgenticRed: Evolving Agentic Systems for Red-Teamingcited by 4
  3. 2026MT-JailBench: A Modular Benchmark for Understanding Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attackscited by 3
  4. 2026Jailbreak Foundry: From Papers to Runnable Attacks for Reproducible Benchmarkingcited by 2
  5. 2026SentGuard: Sentence-Level Streaming Guardrails for Large Language Modelscited by 2
  6. 2026AJAR: Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teamingcited by 1
  7. 2026Safactory: A Scalable Agentic Infrastructure for Training Trustworthy Autonomous Intelligencecited by 1
  8. 2026From Sparse Decisions to Dense Reasoning: A Multi-attribute Trajectory Paradigm for Multimodal Moderationcited by 0
  9. 2026MUSE: A Run-Centric Platform for Multimodal Unified Safety Evaluation of Large Language Modelscited by 0
  10. 2026Mechanistic Origin of Moral Indifference in Language Modelscited by 0
  11. 2026TAME: Test-Time Adversarial Prompt Tuning via Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
  12. 2026REALM: A Unified Red-Teaming Benchmark for Physical-World VLMscited by 0
6 more
  1. 2026MedBench v5: A Dynamic, Process-Oriented, and Hallucination-Aware Benchmark for Clinical Multimodal Modelscited by 0
  2. 2026Hidden in Plain Sight: Diffusion-Based Unrestricted Robotic Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
  3. 2026Fair ASR: Re-Evaluating Black-Box Jailbreaks under Shared Target-Call Budgetscited by 0
  4. 2026Before the Script, Set the Stage: How Worldview Simulation Amplifies Psychologically Grounded Persuasion in Multi-Turn Jailbreakingcited by 0
  5. 2026Representational alignment yields generalizable safety in language modelscited by 0
  6. 2026VisionPsy-Nano: Improving Accuracy, Efficiency, and Reliability in On-Device Vision-Language Modelscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025ARMs: Adaptive Red-Teaming Agent against Multimodal Models with Plug-and-Play Attacks
  2. 2023MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming
  3. 2026FlashRT: Towards Computationally and Memory Efficient Red-Teaming for Prompt Injection and Knowledge Corruption
  4. 2025SIRAJ: Diverse and Efficient Red-Teaming for LLM Agents via Distilled Structured Reasoning
  5. 2026AMT-X: Phase-Structured Multi-Turn Red-Teaming with Checklist-Gated Evaluation
  6. 2024Code-Switching Red-Teaming: LLM Evaluation for Safety and Multilingual Understanding
  7. 2024Against The Achilles' Heel: A Survey on Red Teaming for Generative Models
  8. 2024Automated Red Teaming with GOAT: the Generative Offensive Agent Tester