Building Safe GenAI Applications: An End-to-End Overview of Red Teaming for Large Language Models
Alberto Purpura, Sahil Wadhwa, Jesse Zymet, Akshay Gupta, Andy Luo, Melissa Kazemi Rad, Swapnil Shinde, Mohammad Shahed Sorower
TL;DR
The paper addresses the safety challenges of deploying large language models (LLMs) and argues for red-teaming as a practical, end-to-end approach to uncover vulnerabilities. It offers a concise synthesis of the red-teaming literature, presenting a multi-component framework that covers attack taxonomy, evaluation strategies, metrics, public resources, and mitigation guardrails. Key contributions include a structured end-to-end view of attack methods, turn-count and manual vs automated distinctions, and standardized metrics such as $ASR$ and $AER$ for assessing safety. The work aims to accelerate practical adoption by practitioners and informs future directions for automated multi-turn red-teaming, diverse attack generation, cross-model security, and standardized evaluation benchmarks.
Abstract
The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant privacy, security, and ethical concerns. While much research has proposed methods for defending LLM systems against misuse by malicious actors, researchers have recently complemented these efforts with an offensive approach that involves red teaming, i.e., proactively attacking LLMs with the purpose of identifying their vulnerabilities. This paper provides a concise and practical overview of the LLM red teaming literature, structured so as to describe a multi-component system end-to-end. To motivate red teaming we survey the initial safety needs of some high-profile LLMs, and then dive into the different components of a red teaming system as well as software packages for implementing them. We cover various attack methods, strategies for attack-success evaluation, metrics for assessing experiment outcomes, as well as a host of other considerations. Our survey will be useful for any reader who wants to rapidly obtain a grasp of the major red teaming concepts for their own use in practical applications.