Investigating the Vulnerability of LLM-as-a-Judge Architectures to Prompt-Injection Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Maloyan, Narek, Ashinov, Bislan, Namiot, Dmitry
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Maloyan, Narek
Ashinov, Bislan
Namiot, Dmitry
author_facet Maloyan, Narek
Ashinov, Bislan
Namiot, Dmitry
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed as evaluators (LLM-as-a-Judge) for assessing the quality of machine-generated text. This paradigm offers scalability and cost-effectiveness compared to human annotation. However, the reliability and security of such systems, particularly their robustness against adversarial manipulations, remain critical concerns. This paper investigates the vulnerability of LLM-as-a-Judge architectures to prompt-injection attacks, where malicious inputs are designed to compromise the judge's decision-making process. We formalize two primary attack strategies: Comparative Undermining Attack (CUA), which directly targets the final decision output, and Justification Manipulation Attack (JMA), which aims to alter the model's generated reasoning. Using the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) optimization method, we craft adversarial suffixes appended to one of the responses being compared. Experiments conducted on the MT-Bench Human Judgments dataset with open-source instruction-tuned LLMs (Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Falcon3-3B-Instruct) demonstrate significant susceptibility. The CUA achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) exceeding 30\%, while JMA also shows notable effectiveness. These findings highlight substantial vulnerabilities in current LLM-as-a-Judge systems, underscoring the need for robust defense mechanisms and further research into adversarial evaluation and trustworthiness in LLM-based assessment frameworks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13348
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating the Vulnerability of LLM-as-a-Judge Architectures to Prompt-Injection Attacks
Maloyan, Narek
Ashinov, Bislan
Namiot, Dmitry
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed as evaluators (LLM-as-a-Judge) for assessing the quality of machine-generated text. This paradigm offers scalability and cost-effectiveness compared to human annotation. However, the reliability and security of such systems, particularly their robustness against adversarial manipulations, remain critical concerns. This paper investigates the vulnerability of LLM-as-a-Judge architectures to prompt-injection attacks, where malicious inputs are designed to compromise the judge's decision-making process. We formalize two primary attack strategies: Comparative Undermining Attack (CUA), which directly targets the final decision output, and Justification Manipulation Attack (JMA), which aims to alter the model's generated reasoning. Using the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) optimization method, we craft adversarial suffixes appended to one of the responses being compared. Experiments conducted on the MT-Bench Human Judgments dataset with open-source instruction-tuned LLMs (Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Falcon3-3B-Instruct) demonstrate significant susceptibility. The CUA achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) exceeding 30\%, while JMA also shows notable effectiveness. These findings highlight substantial vulnerabilities in current LLM-as-a-Judge systems, underscoring the need for robust defense mechanisms and further research into adversarial evaluation and trustworthiness in LLM-based assessment frameworks.
title Investigating the Vulnerability of LLM-as-a-Judge Architectures to Prompt-Injection Attacks
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13348