{"id":1154923,"date":"2025-11-05T18:23:41","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T02:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1154923"},"modified":"2025-11-05T18:23:42","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T02:23:42","slug":"siraj-diverse-and-efficient-red-teaming-for-llm-agents-via-distilled-structured-reasoning","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/siraj-diverse-and-efficient-red-teaming-for-llm-agents-via-distilled-structured-reasoning\/","title":{"rendered":"SIRAJ: Diverse and Efficient Red-Teaming for LLM Agents via Distilled Structured Reasoning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The ability of LLM agents to plan and invoke tools exposes them to new safety risks, making a comprehensive red-teaming system crucial for discovering vulnerabilities and ensuring their safe deployment. We present SIRAJ: a generic red-teaming framework for arbitrary black-box LLM agents. We employ a dynamic two-step process that starts with an agent definition and generates diverse seed test cases that cover various risk outcomes, tool-use trajectories, and risk sources. Then, it iteratively constructs and refines model-based adversarial attacks based on the execution trajectories of former attempts. To optimize the red-teaming cost, we present a model distillation approach that leverages structured forms of a teacher model&#8217;s reasoning to train smaller models that are equally effective. Across diverse evaluation agent settings, our seed test case generation approach yields 2 &#8212; 2.5x boost to the coverage of risk outcomes and tool-calling trajectories. Our distilled 8B red-teamer model improves attack success rate by 100%, surpassing the 671B Deepseek-R1 model. Our ablations and analyses validate the effectiveness of the iterative framework, structured reasoning, and the generalization of our red-teamer models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The ability of LLM agents to plan and invoke tools exposes them to new safety risks, making a comprehensive red-teaming system crucial for discovering vulnerabilities and ensuring their safe deployment. We present SIRAJ: a generic red-teaming framework for arbitrary black-box LLM agents. We employ a dynamic two-step process that starts with an agent definition and 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