{"id":1171698,"date":"2026-05-12T15:59:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T22:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/personateaming-exploring-how-introducing-personas-can-improve-automated-ai-red-teaming\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T12:38:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T19:38:24","slug":"personateaming-exploring-how-introducing-personas-can-improve-automated-ai-red-teaming","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/personateaming-exploring-how-introducing-personas-can-improve-automated-ai-red-teaming\/","title":{"rendered":"PersonaTeaming: Exploring How Introducing Personas Can Improve Automated AI Red-Teaming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recent developments in AI governance and safety research have called for red-teaming methods that can effectively surface potential risks posed by AI models. Many of these calls have emphasized how the identities and backgrounds of red-teamers can shape their red-teaming strategies, and thus the kinds of risks they are likely to uncover. While automated red-teaming approaches promise to complement human red-teaming by enabling larger-scale exploration of model behavior, current approaches do not consider the role of identity. As an initial step towards incorporating people&#8217;s background and identities in automated red-teaming, we develop and evaluate a novel method, PersonaTeaming, that introduces personas in the adversarial prompt generation process to explore a wider spectrum of adversarial strategies. In particular, we first introduce a methodology for mutating prompts based on either&#8221;red-teaming expert&#8221;personas or&#8221;regular AI user&#8221;personas. We then develop a dynamic persona-generating algorithm that automatically generates various persona types adaptive to different seed prompts. In addition, we develop a set of new metrics to explicitly measure the&#8221;mutation distance&#8221;to complement existing diversity measurements of adversarial prompts. Our experiments show promising improvements (up to 144.1%) in the attack success rates of adversarial prompts through persona mutation, while maintaining prompt diversity, compared to RainbowPlus, a state-of-the-art automated red-teaming method. We discuss the strengths and limitations of different persona types and mutation methods, shedding light on future opportunities to explore complementarities between automated and human red-teaming approaches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recent developments in AI governance and safety research have called for red-teaming methods that can effectively surface potential risks posed by AI models. Many of these calls have emphasized how the identities and backgrounds of red-teamers can shape their red-teaming strategies, and thus the kinds of risks they are likely to uncover. While automated red-teaming [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"arXiv","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2025-09-03","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":false,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[{"provider":"s2","id":"d9490d1ce9f58c5d545941246854e41831e2a74f"},{"provider":"doi","id":"10.48550\/arXiv.2509.03728"},{"provider":"arxiv","id":"2509.03728"}],"msr_hide_image_in_river":null,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13554],"msr-publication-type":[193724],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[246691,248485],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-1171698","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-human-computer-interaction","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-computer-science","msr-field-of-study-human-computer-interaction"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2025-09-03","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"arXiv","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":0,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"doi","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.48550\/arXiv.2509.03728","label_id":"243106","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/dblp.org\/rec\/journals\/corr\/abs-2509-03728.html","label_id":"243109","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2509.03728","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Wesley Deng","user_id":44164,"rest_url":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Wesley Deng"},{"type":"name","value":"Sunnie S. 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