mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MAGIC: A Co-Evolving Attacker-Defender Adversarial Game for Robust LLM Safety

arXiv 2602.01539 ↗First posted 2 Feb 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.LGcited by 15

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Ensuring robust safety alignment is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing defenses often lag behind evolving adversarial attacks due to their reliance on static, pre-collected data distributions. In this paper, we introduce MAGIC, a novel multi-turn multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that formulates LLM safety alignment as an adversarial asymmetric game. Specifically, an attacker agent learns to iteratively rewrite original queries into deceptive prompts, while a defender agent simultaneously optimizes its policy to recognize and refuse such inputs. This dynamic process triggers a co-evolution, where the attacker's ever-changing strategies continuously uncover long-tail vulnerabilities, driving the defender to generalize to unseen attack patterns. Remarkably, we observe that the attacker, endowed with initial reasoning ability, evolves novel, previously unseen combinatorial strategies through iterative RL training, underscoring our method's substantial potential. Theoretically, we provide insights into a more robust game equilibrium and derive safety guarantees. Extensive experiments validate our framework's effectiveness, demonstrating superior defense success rates without compromising the helpfulness of the model. Our code is available at https://github.com/BattleWen/MAGIC.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 61 of its 74 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

Builds on

61 of 74 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Safety Alignment of LMs via Non-cooperative Games23 Dec
  2. 2025Adversarial Attack-Defense Co-Evolution for LLM Safety Alignment via Tree-Group Dual-Aware Search and Optimization24 Nov
  3. 2025Chasing Moving Targets with Online Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Safer Language Models9 Jun
  4. 2025Lifelong Safety Alignment for Language Models26 May
  5. 2025MTSA: Multi-turn Safety Alignment for LLMs through Multi-round Red-teaming22 May
  6. 2024SORRY-Bench: Systematically Evaluating Large Language Model Safety Refusal20 Jun
  7. 2024OR-Bench: An Over-Refusal Benchmark for Large Language Models31 May
  8. 2023Safe RLHF: Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback19 Oct
  9. 2023Jailbreak and Guard Aligned Language Models with Only Few In-Context Demonstrations10 Oct
  10. 2023GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher12 Aug
  11. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models27 Jul
  12. 2022Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned23 Aug

Other references · 49

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  2. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
  3. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,768
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  5. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,710
  6. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  7. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 2,950
  8. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
  9. 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?cited by 1,565
  10. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
  11. 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusalcited by 1,330
  12. 2023Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queriescited by 1,326
37 more
  1. 2023Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Modelscited by 1,143
  2. 2024Length-Controlled AlpacaEval: A Simple Way to Debias Automatic Evaluatorscited by 865
  3. 2022Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Modelscited by 760
  4. 2023Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automaticallycited by 619
  5. 2023XSTest: A Test Suite for Identifying Exaggerated Safety Behaviours in Large Language Modelscited by 477
  6. 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agentscited by 476
  7. 2024WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMscited by 460
  8. 2023"Do Anything Now": Characterizing and Evaluating In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on Large Language Modelscited by 457
  9. 2023SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attackscited by 434
  10. 2024A StrongREJECT for Empty Jailbreakscited by 352
  11. 2023Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4cited by 290
  12. 2023A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Generalized Nested Jailbreak Prompts can Fool Large Language Models Easilycited by 242
  13. 2023LLM Self Defense: By Self Examination, LLMs Know They Are Being Trickedcited by 226
  14. 2024WildTeaming at Scale: From In-the-Wild Jailbreaks to (Adversarially) Safer Language Modelscited by 206
  15. 2023Scalable and Transferable Black-Box Jailbreaks for Language Models via Persona Modulationcited by 202
  16. 2024ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMscited by 197
  17. 2024Rainbow Teaming: Open-Ended Generation of Diverse Adversarial Promptscited by 189
  18. 2024AutoDAN-Turbo: A Lifelong Agent for Strategy Self-Exploration to Jailbreak LLMscited by 185
  19. 2023MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teamingcited by 161
  20. 2024Robust Prompt Optimization for Defending Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attackscited by 150
  21. 2024Automatic and Universal Prompt Injection Attacks against Large Language Modelscited by 112
  22. 2025X-Teaming: Multi-Turn Jailbreaks and Defenses with Adaptive Multi-Agentscited by 112
  23. 2024OLMES: A Standard for Language Model Evaluationscited by 100
  24. 2024Improved Techniques for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Modelscited by 98
  25. 2024LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shiftscited by 80
  26. 2025ReMA: Learning to Meta-think for LLMs with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 78
  27. 2024FlipAttack: Jailbreak LLMs via Flippingcited by 73
  28. 2024Fight Back Against Jailbreaking via Prompt Adversarial Tuningcited by 63
  29. 2025Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model and Agent Safetycited by 63
  30. 2025Reasoning-Augmented Conversation for Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Modelscited by 61
  31. 2024Boosting Jailbreak Attack with Momentumcited by 38
  32. 2024Accelerating Greedy Coordinate Gradient and General Prompt Optimization via Probe Samplingcited by 33
  33. 2026OpenRT: An Open-Source Red Teaming Framework for Multimodal LLMscited by 18
  34. 2025Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Agent Safetycited by 14
  35. 2024Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Gamescited by 13
  36. 2025Geneshift: Impact of different scenario shift on Jailbreaking LLMcited by 4
  37. 2025AdvEvo-MARL: Shaping Internalized Safety through Adversarial Co-Evolution in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 15.

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  1. 2026Be Your Own Red Teamer: Safety Alignment via Self-Play and Reflective Experience Replay
  2. 2026CoopGuard: Stateful Cooperative Agents Safeguarding LLMs Against Evolving Multi-Round Attacks
  3. 2026TriPlay-RL: Tri-Role Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for LLM Safety Alignment
  4. 2023Survey of Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models Revealed by Adversarial Attacks
  5. 2026CHASE: Adversarial Red-Blue Teaming for Improving LLM Safety using Reinforcement Learning
  6. 2026Yuvion LLM: An Adversarially-Aware Large Language Model for Content And AI Safety
  7. 2025Agent Safety Alignment via Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2026SafeHarbor: Defining Precise Decision Boundaries via Hierarchical Memory-Augmented Guardrail for LLM Agent Safety