AutoAdvExBench: Benchmarking autonomous exploitation of adversarial example defenses

2025-03-03

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of realistic evaluation of large language models’ (LLMs) offensive and defensive capabilities in adversarial machine learning. We introduce the first benchmark for autonomously attacking real-world defense systems against adversarial examples—grounded in actual security expert workflows, rather than proxy safety evaluations. Distinct from prior work, we explicitly differentiate between CTF-style pedagogical scenarios and authentic defense tasks, and propose a novel evaluation paradigm integrating autonomous agents, domain-specific attack/defense knowledge modeling, dynamic analysis of defense code, and multi-step reasoning. Experiments show that the strongest LLM agent breaches 75% of CTF defenses but only 13% of real-world defenses; scaling to more capable models improves success to just 21%, exposing a substantial capability gap. This stark disparity validates the benchmark’s high discriminative power and rigor in assessing LLM security competence.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Search Tool Learning with LLM: Teaching LLMs to invoke search and make use of retrieved information
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation

Abstract

We introduce AutoAdvExBench, a benchmark to evaluate if large language models (LLMs) can autonomously exploit defenses to adversarial examples. Unlike existing security benchmarks that often serve as proxies for real-world tasks, bench directly measures LLMs' success on tasks regularly performed by machine learning security experts. This approach offers a significant advantage: if a LLM could solve the challenges presented in bench, it would immediately present practical utility for adversarial machine learning researchers. We then design a strong agent that is capable of breaking 75% of CTF-like ("homework exercise") adversarial example defenses. However, we show that this agent is only able to succeed on 13% of the real-world defenses in our benchmark, indicating the large gap between difficulty in attacking"real"code, and CTF-like code. In contrast, a stronger LLM that can attack 21% of real defenses only succeeds on 54% of CTF-like defenses. We make this benchmark available at https://github.com/ethz-spylab/AutoAdvExBench.

Problem

• Evaluates LLMs' ability to exploit adversarial example defenses.
• Measures LLMs' success on real-world machine learning security tasks.
• Highlights gap between CTF-like and real-world defense attack difficulty.

Innovation

• Benchmark evaluates LLMs on adversarial defenses.
• Agent breaks 75% CTF-like defenses, 13% real-world.
• Stronger LLM attacks 21% real, 54% CTF-like defenses.