RedRFT: A Light-Weight Benchmark for Reinforcement Fine-Tuning-Based Red Teaming

TL;DR

RedRFT introduces a lightweight, standardized benchmark for reinforcement fine-tuning-based red teaming of large language models, enabling consistent evaluation, reproducibility, and rapid prototyping of RFT methods.

Contribution

It provides a modular, easy-to-use benchmark that addresses implementation variability and supports diverse experimental configurations for RFT-based red teaming.

Findings

Conducted extensive ablation studies on key RFT components.

Demonstrated the impact of implementation choices on RFT performance.

Provided a comprehensive, reproducible framework for future RFT research.

Abstract

Red teaming has proven to be an effective method for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) has emerged as a promising strategy among existing red teaming techniques. However, a lack of a unified benchmark hinders current RFT-based red teaming methods. Implementation details, especially in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based RFT, significantly affect outcome stability and reproducibility. To address this issue, we introduce RedRFT, a lightweight benchmark designed to simplify and standardize the implementation and evaluation of RFT-based red teaming. RedRFT combines the design strengths of both single-file CleanRL and highly modularized Tianshou, offering high-quality single-file red teaming implementations and modular PPO core components, such as the General Advantage Estimator. It supports a variety of token and sentence diversity metrics, featuring modularized intrinsic reward computation that facilitates plug-and-play experimentation. To clarify their influence on RFT performance, we conducted an extensive ablation study on key components, including Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and Lagrange Multiplier. We hope this work contributes to 1) gaining a comprehensive understanding of the implementation nuances of RFT-based red teaming algorithms, and 2) enabling rapid prototyping of innovative features for RFT-based red teaming. Code for the benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/x-zheng16/RedRFT.git.