Traian Rebedea

Eduard Stefan Dinuta, Iustin Sirbu, Traian Rebedea

Safety for Large Language Models (LLMs) has been an ongoing research focus since their emergence and is even more relevant nowadays with the increasing capacity of those models. Currently, there are several guardrails in place for all public LLMs and multiple proposed datasets for training safety classifiers. However, training these safety classifiers relies on large quantities of labeled data, which can be problematic to acquire, prone to labeling errors, or often include synthetic data. To address these issues, we suggest a different approach: utilizing semi-supervised learning techniques, which leverage both labeled and unlabeled data, to improve the performance on the safety task. We analyze the improvements that these techniques can offer for both prompts given to Large Language Models and the responses to those requests. Moreover, since augmentation is the central part of semi-supervised algorithms, we demonstrate the importance of using task-specific augmentations, which significantly increase the performance when compared to general-purpose augmentation techniques.

Aishwarya Padmakumar, Leon Derczynski, Traian Rebedea et al.

Automated methods for red teaming LLMs are an important tool to identify LLM vulnerabilities that may not be covered in static benchmarks, allowing for more thorough probing. They can also adapt to each specific LLM to discover weaknesses unique to it. Most current automated red teaming methods are intended for tackling safety and content moderation. Thus, they make use of content safety models as evaluators and optimize for circumventing them, and as such, have not been tested with other adversarial intents not typically captured by these. We propose a pipeline for training a red teaming model that can generalize to arbitrary adversarial goals, including objectives it has not been directly trained on, and that does not depend on the existence of a pre-existing evaluator available at training time. We demonstrate that finetuning small models, such as Qwen3-8B, using this pipeline results in a substantial improvement in their ability to generate attacks for both in and out of domain adversarial goals.