defense arXiv Nov 24, 2025 · Nov 2025
Xurui Li, Kaisong Song, Rui Zhu et al. · Fudan University · Alibaba Group +3 more
Co-evolving attack-defense framework uses MCTS-based jailbreak exploration and curriculum RL to jointly train stronger LLM safety alignment
Prompt Injection nlp
Large Language Models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in web services, delivering unprecedented capabilities while amplifying societal risks. Existing works tend to focus on either isolated jailbreak attacks or static defenses, neglecting the dynamic interplay between evolving threats and safeguards in real-world web contexts. To mitigate these challenges, we propose ACE-Safety (Adversarial Co-Evolution for LLM Safety), a novel framework that jointly optimize attack and defense models by seamlessly integrating two key innovative procedures: (1) Group-aware Strategy-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search (GS-MCTS), which efficiently explores jailbreak strategies to uncover vulnerabilities and generate diverse adversarial samples; (2) Adversarial Curriculum Tree-aware Group Policy Optimization (AC-TGPO), which jointly trains attack and defense LLMs with challenging samples via curriculum reinforcement learning, enabling robust mutual improvement. Evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing attack and defense approaches, and provides a feasible pathway for developing LLMs that can sustainably support responsible AI ecosystems.
llm transformer Fudan University · Alibaba Group · Yale University +2 more