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Foundation Lab

Automated Red Teaming

Unknown unknowns dominate safety issues

Concept 89 of 100Scaling & AlignmentPhase 12
#89Auto RedTeamScaling & Alignment
key equation\max_p U(p, M) \rightarrow \min_M \mathbb{E}_p[U(p, M)]

Selected Foundation Object

Keep the equation fixed; move through the evidence.

Concept 89 of 100Auto RedTeamScaling & Alignment / Phase 12: Advanced alignment & safety research
Current question

Red-team model proposes attacks, evaluator scores target response

\max_p U(p, M) \rightarrow \min_M \mathbb{E}_p[U(p, M)]
PredictionCommit before the demo.

Ask what should change when the equation is manipulated, then let the visualization test that expectation.

EvidenceCompare local witness and source.

Use the runnable panel, the key equation, and canonical papers as separate forms of evidence for the same object.

InvariantName what survives notation changes.

The useful learning product is the reusable mechanism you can carry into another model, paper, or engineering tradeoff.

Next moveContinue through the atlas.

Use prerequisites, dependents, and semantic links to repair the next gap without leaving the object behind.

Why It Matters for Modern Models

  • Unknown unknowns dominate safety issues
  • Automated coverage exceeds human handcrafted tests
  • RL-based generation finds progressively harder failures

What Tutorials Skip

What is still poorly explained in textbooks and papers:

  • Red-team model proposes attacks, evaluator scores target response
  • Iterate: improve adversarial generation to find harder failures
  • Feed discoveries into filters, training data, policy updates

Interactive Visualization

Core Math (Optional Deep Dive)

If you want intuition first, start with the key equation and the visualization. Come back here for the full walkthrough.

Key Equation
maxpU(p,M)minMEp[U(p,M)]\max_p U(p, M) \rightarrow \min_M \mathbb{E}_p[U(p, M)]

Adversarial search for failure-inducing prompts:

maxpPU(p,M)\max_{p \in \mathcal{P}} U(p, M)

then mitigate:

minMEpRedTeam[U(p,M)]\min_M \mathbb{E}_{p \sim \text{RedTeam}}[U(p, M)]

where UU measures unsafe behavior (toxicity, policy violation, leakage).

Canonical Papers

Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models

Perez et al.2022EMNLP
Read paper →

Connections

Next Moves

Choose the next question to carry this object forward.