arXiv subjects

Onkar Shelar

Publications and source records attributed to Onkar Shelar.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Distributed Quality-Diversity Search for Toxicity in Large Language Models

Large Language Models remain vulnerable to adversarial prompts that elicit harmful responses, and scaling red-teaming to cover a broad range of failure modes is constrained by the cost of text generation and evaluation. We present \emph{ToxSearch-S}, a speciated extension of toxicity-focused evolutionary prompt search with incremental, embedding-driven niche maintenance, together with an MPI master-worker realization that centralizes population and species bookkeeping on rank~0 while offloading prompt evolution and evaluation to $n_w$ parallel workers. Under a common budget, ToxSearch-S attains peak toxicity competitive with both ToxSearch and RainbowPlus while following a measurably less toxic best-so-far trajectory, indicating lower cumulative search pressure. Diversity is non-uni-dimensional: RainbowPlus yields greater embedding-level spread, whereas ToxSearch-S partitions high-toxicity prompts into more localized behavioral pockets, reflected by a higher DBSCAN cluster count. MPI distribution delivers substantial wall-clock gains, approximately $1.8\times$ with two workers and $3.2\times$ with four, while leaving Best@B statistically indistinguishable from sequential execution. Four-worker runs also produce significantly larger final species cardinality and more toxicity-bearing species, without a reliable gain in global peak toxicity. These results position incremental speciation as a practical quality-diversity mechanism for AI Safety and MPI as an effective means of compressing time-to-result while preserving measured search outcomes.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Diversifying Toxicity Search in Large Language Models Through Speciation

Evolutionary prompt search is a practical black-box approach for red teaming large language models, however existing methods often collapse onto a small family of high-performing prompts, limiting coverage of distinct failure modes. We present a speciated quality-diversity extension of \textit{ToxSearch} that maintains multiple high-toxicity prompt niches in parallel rather than optimizing a single best prompt. \textit{ToxSearch-S} introduces unsupervised prompt speciation via a search methodology that maintains capacity-limited species with exemplar leaders, a reserve pool for emerging niches, and species-aware parent selection that trades off within-niche exploitation and cross-niche exploration. Preliminary results show \textit{ToxSearch-S} reaching higher peak toxicity ($\approx 0.73$ vs.\ $\approx 0.47$) with a heavier tail (top-10 median $0.66$ vs.\ $0.45$) than the baseline. Speciation also yields broader semantic coverage under a topics-as-species analysis (higher effective topic diversity and larger unique topic coverage). Finally, species formed are well-separated in embedding space (mean separation ratio $\approx 1.93$) and exhibit distinct toxicity distributions, indicating that speciation partitions the adversarial space into behaviorally differentiated niches rather than superficial lexical variants.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

ToxSearch: Evolving Prompts for Toxicity Search in Large Language Models

Large Language Models remain vulnerable to adversarial prompts that elicit toxic content even after safety alignment. We present ToxSearch, a black-box evolutionary framework that tests model safety by evolving prompts in a synchronous steady-state loop. The system employs a diverse set of operators, including lexical substitutions, negation, back-translation, paraphrasing, and two semantic crossover operators, while a moderation oracle provides fitness guidance. Operator-level analysis shows heterogeneous behavior: lexical substitutions offer the best yield-variance trade-off, semantic-similarity crossover acts as a precise low-throughput inserter, and global rewrites exhibit high variance with elevated refusal costs. Using elite prompts evolved on LLaMA 3.1 8B, we observe practically meaningful but attenuated cross-model transfer, with toxicity roughly halving on most targets, smaller LLaMA 3.2 variants showing the strongest resistance, and some cross-architecture models retaining higher toxicity. These results suggest that small, controllable perturbations are effective vehicles for systematic red-teaming and that defenses should anticipate cross-model reuse of adversarial prompts rather than focusing only on single-model hardening.

cs.NE↗