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Towards Reliable and Practical LLM Security Evaluations via Bayesian Modelling

Authors: Mary Llewellyn, Annie Gray, Josh Collyer, Michael Harries

Published: 2025-10-07

arXiv ID: 2510.05709v1

Added to Library: 2025-11-14 23:14 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Before adopting a new large language model (LLM) architecture, it is critical to understand vulnerabilities accurately. Existing evaluations can be difficult to trust, often drawing conclusions from LLMs that are not meaningfully comparable, relying on heuristic inputs or employing metrics that fail to capture the inherent uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a principled and practical end-to-end framework for evaluating LLM vulnerabilities to prompt injection attacks. First, we propose practical approaches to experimental design, tackling unfair LLM comparisons by considering two practitioner scenarios: when training an LLM and when deploying a pre-trained LLM. Second, we address the analysis of experiments and propose a Bayesian hierarchical model with embedding-space clustering. This model is designed to improve uncertainty quantification in the common scenario that LLM outputs are not deterministic, test prompts are designed imperfectly, and practitioners only have a limited amount of compute to evaluate vulnerabilities. We show the improved inferential capabilities of the model in several prompt injection attack settings. Finally, we demonstrate the pipeline to evaluate the security of Transformer versus Mamba architectures. Our findings show that consideration of output variability can suggest less definitive findings. However, for some attacks, we find notably increased Transformer and Mamba-variant vulnerabilities across LLMs with the same training data or mathematical ability.

🔍 Key Points

  • The paper introduces a framework for reliable security evaluation of large language models (LLMs) against prompt injection attacks, addressing confounding variables and uncertainty quantification that hinder existing evaluations.
  • A Bayesian hierarchical model is proposed that incorporates embedding-space clustering to improve inferential accuracy from limited data while accounting for the probabilistic nature of LLM outputs.
  • Practical guidance is provided on experimental design specifically for fair comparisons of LLM vulnerabilities during both training and deployment phases.
  • The framework demonstrates significant findings regarding the adversarial robustness of Transformer models versus new Mamba architectures, highlighting notable differences in vulnerabilities depending on architecture and training data.
  • The research contributes to scalable LLM evaluation practices which can adapt to various architectural comparisons in real-world applications.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is crucial for advancing our understanding of LLM security evaluations by providing a systematic and principled methodology that addresses common pitfalls in existing evaluation frameworks. The incorporation of Bayesian methods ensures improved reliability and insight into vulnerabilities that can significantly impact the deployment of LLMs in safety-critical applications. As LLMs become increasingly integrated into various domains, comprehensively addressing their security becomes paramount, making this research highly relevant.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

For AI security researchers, this paper provides essential methodologies and practices for assessing LLM vulnerabilities, a topic of increasing importance as these models are utilized in sensitive and high-stakes environments. The novel Bayesian hierarchical model proposed here opens pathways for more trustworthy evaluations, potentially guiding future research on adversarial robustness and safe deployment of LLM architectures.

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