This work proposes CONfiguration Tree-search for Red-teaming Agents (CONTRA), an LLM-assisted tree-search algorithm that discovers agent configurations resulting in the execution of malicious actions.
Abstract
Recent tools such as OpenClaw have extended the capabilities of LLM-based agents from simple dialog-based systems to fully autonomous agents. These systems allow personalization of the agent through modifiable internal files and the installation of skills. While this enables deployment in a wide range of settings and the automation of diverse tasks, greater capability and autonomy increases the risk of malicious actions being executed unintentionally. In this work, we explore the interplay between agent configuration and the risk of executing dangerous actions without explicit instruction. To this end, we propose CONfiguration Tree-search for Red-teaming Agents (CONTRA), an LLM-assisted tree-search algorithm that discovers agent configurations resulting in the execution of malicious actions. CONTRA works by reasoning about benign yet dangerous configurations and evaluating them in a simulated environment. We construct a dataset of the 473 most popular skills from a public repository, along with 2-5 corresponding malicious target actions per skill. In a large-scale analysis, we find that 75.1% of skills have at least one configuration resulting in the execution of a malicious action, most of which have not been detected as containing malicious content by existing scans. Overall, CONTRA successfully identifies a configuration leading to the execution of the target action in 39.2% of all tested cases. Our findings demonstrate that current agents provide insufficient safety with respect to personalization.
RedAgentBench is introduced, an executable framework for autonomous red-teaming and faithful measurement that shows that executable evaluation can improve safety measurement and identify actionable intervention points.
Zixing Chen, Xingyuan Liu, Jie Zhu et al.· 0 citations
This work presents the first systematic evaluation framework for agentic abstention, and identifies failure modes such as post-hoc abstention, in which agents execute irreversible actions before recognizing abstention triggers.
Xun Liu, Y. Zhang, Vira Kasprova et al.· 2 citations
Production LLM agents such as Claude Code and Codex operate over untrusted content, files, commands, and workspace state, making safety failures directly actionable. Red-teaming must therefore keep pace with evolving models and tools. Existing approaches mainly optimize attack success and preserve artifacts such as benchmarks, payloads, or attack programs, which record where attacks succeed but not the enabling conditions behind unsafe agent behavior. We study automated red-teaming for production LLM agents using one agentic research environment to discover reusable vulnerability knowledge about another. We present AHA, a falsifiable discovery loop that proposes a vulnerability hypothesis, constructs a falsifier, instantiates a valid attack, executes it in a sandboxed harness, reflects on the trajectory, and promotes confirmed findings into a Vulnerability Concept Graph (VCG). Each concept links an attacker-facing surface to an unsafe trajectory through a claim, enabling condition, falsifier, transfer prediction, and supporting evidence. Across Claude Code and Codex on three scenarios covering direct and indirect attacks, the discovered concepts reveal a reusable vulnerability core across models and agents. A frozen VCG requires no further search and outperforms the strongest frozen discovery baseline by 14.2 percentage points under the same single-shot protocol, while transferring across scenarios and attack channels. The resulting VCG provides an auditable artifact for production safety teams to inspect vulnerabilities, validate patches, and accumulate reusable safety knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/henrymao2004/Auto-research-red-teaming-in-sleep.
Agent Gym is introduced, a modular, domain-agnostic framework that wraps any existing LLM-based agent in a continuous evaluation-and-evolution loop and introduces the Spec-to-Note Gap, an autoencoder-inspired view of agentic system transparency.
Pouya Ghiasnezhad Omran, Michael Zimmermann, Duncan Cambridge et al.· 0 citations
NetConfArena is presented, an executable benchmark for evaluating LLM agents in closed-loop network configuration, and its findings suggest two future directions: using validated trajectories as supervision signals to improve foundation models, and designing harness mechanisms that make agent execution more reliable and accountable.
Chang Liu, Xiaohui Xie, Xinyi Chen et al.· 0 citations
This work proposes the Evolutionary Markov Hypergraph Attack (EMHA), a black-box policy that performs feedback-driven environment evolution by coordinating authorized state transitions without requiring parameter updates, and establishes OpenART as a scalable foundation for studying agent safety in complex, evolving environments.
Yunhao Chen, Xin Wang, Yixu Wang et al.· 0 citations