ASTRA: Autonomous Spatial-Temporal Red-teaming for AI Software Assistants
ASTRA is an automated red-teaming system designed to systematically uncover safety flaws in AI coding assistants and security guidance systems. It operates in three stages: building structured domain-specific knowledge graphs, performing online spatial and temporal vulnerability exploration, and generating high-quality violation-inducing cases for model alignment. ASTRA significantly outperforms existing techniques, finding 11–66% more issues and leading to 17% more effective alignment training. ✨
Article Points:
1
ASTRA: Automated red-teaming for AI coding assistants, focusing on realistic vulnerabilities.
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Three-stage process: offline domain modeling, online exploration (spatial/temporal), model alignment.
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Spatial exploration uses knowledge graphs to adaptively probe input space for boundary cases.
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Temporal exploration analyzes AI's chain-of-thought to exploit reasoning weaknesses.
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Outperforms existing methods, finding 11-66% more issues and improving alignment by 17%.
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Addresses limitations of current blue-teaming (CB, DA) by identifying policy holes and reasoning flaws.
ASTRA: Autonomous Spatial-Temporal Red-teaming for AI Software Assistants
Purpose
Uncover AI safety flaws
Focus on realistic vulnerabilities
Target code generation & security guidance
Methodology
Cognitive Framework for analysis
Knowledge Graphs for domain modeling
Gibbs Sampling for guided exploration
LLM Interrogation for enumeration
Key Stages
Offline Domain Modeling
- Knowledge Graph construction
- Abstraction hierarchies
Online Vulnerability Exploration
- Spatial exploration (input space)
- Temporal exploration (reasoning)
Model Alignment
- Fine-tuning with violation cases
- Balance safety & utility
Evaluation
Outperforms existing RT techniques
Spatial exploration is efficient
Temporal exploration effective on CoT models
Reasoning-based online judge
Impact
Finds 11-66% more issues
17% more effective alignment training
Improves AI system safety
Blue-Teaming Insights