artificial intelligence

AMT-X: Phase-Structured Multi-Turn Red-Teaming with Checklist-Gated Evaluation

arXiv:2607.11151

summary

The paper introduces AMT‑X, a framework that conducts multi‑turn red‑team attacks on large language models using a phase‑structured state machine and evaluates success with a multi‑role jury and checklist gating to distinguish partial from fully actionable harmful outputs.

Abstract

Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) relies largely on single-turn attack datasets and single-judge scoring, underestimating risk from adaptive multi-turn adversaries and reporting a single success rate that does not separate partially actionable outputs from those carrying complete operational detail. We propose AMT-X (Adaptive Multi-Turn Exploitation), a phase-structured multi-turn red-teaming framework. Unlike prior multi-turn attacks that rely on ad hoc escalation or free-form per-goal plans, AMT-X casts the attack as an explicit, reproducible multi-phase state machine driven by semantic signals from the victim, and replaces single-judge scoring with a multi-role jury whose phase-conditioned checklists gate success on actionable harm. Across six frontier victim models (queried under their default safety alignment, without added moderation layers) and seven Moderation sub-categories, AMT-X attains overall attack success rates of 97.6-100% under a lenient score threshold, but 66.7-78.6% under a stricter gate requiring complete, real, and operational detail: a gap of up to 33 percentage points between partially and fully actionable harm.

A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/VulcanLab/amt-x

Topics & keywords

#llm safety#red teaming#multi-turn attacks#phase-structured evaluation#checklist gatingadaptive multi-turn exploitationstate machinesemantic signalsjury checklistoperational detail