Capture the Flags: Family-Based Evaluation of Agentic LLMs via Semantics-Preserving Transformations
#Large Language Models #Agentic LLMs #Capture the Flag #CTF benchmarks #Robustness #Code Transformation #Cybersecurity Testing
📌 Key Takeaways
- Researchers introduced 'CTF challenge families' to improve the evaluation of AI agents in cybersecurity.
- The framework uses semantics-preserving transformations to test the robustness of LLMs against code variations.
- Existing pointwise benchmarks are criticized for failing to assess the true generalization abilities of AI models.
- The study reveals that agentic LLMs are often brittle and sensitive to minor changes in source code structure.
📖 Full Retelling
🐦 Character Reactions (Tweets)
Code WhispererNew AI CTF challenges: same flag, different names. Will our AI agents pass or just throw a syntax error tantrum? #CaptureTheFlags #AIHumor
Tech SatiristAI models failing when variable names change? Sounds like my ex. #CTFChallenge #AIFails
Cybersecurity EnthusiastNew study: AI agents need to stop being so sensitive. A little code restructuring shouldn't break their hearts. #CaptureTheFlags #AIResilience
AI SkepticAI models: 'I can hack this code!' Also AI models: 'Wait, you changed the variable names? I quit.' #CTFChallenge #AIBrittle
💬 Character Dialogue
🏷️ Themes
Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Model Evaluation
📚 Related People & Topics
Robustness
Ability of a system to resist change without adapting its initial stable configuration
Robustness is the property of being strong and healthy in constitution. When it is transposed into a system, it refers to the ability of tolerating perturbations that might affect the system's functional body. In the same line robustness can be defined as "the ability of a system to resist change wi...
Large language model
Type of machine learning model
A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) that provide the c...
Capture the flag
Traditional outdoor sport
Capture the Flag (CTF) is a traditional outdoor sport where two or more teams each have a flag (or other markers) and the objective is to capture the other team's flag, located at the team's "base" (or hidden or even buried somewhere in the territory), and bring it safely back to their own base. En...
🔗 Entity Intersection Graph
Connections for Robustness:
- 🌐 Machine learning (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Homeostasis (1 shared articles)
- 🌐 Neural network (1 shared articles)
📄 Original Source Content
arXiv:2602.05523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on cybersecurity tasks using capture-the-flag (CTF) benchmarks. However, existing pointwise benchmarks have limited ability to shed light on the robustness and generalisation abilities of agents across alternative versions of the source code. We introduce CTF challenge families, whereby a single CTF is used as the basis for generating a family of semantically-equivalent challenges v