Adversarial Moral Stress Testing of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jamshidi, Saeid, Khomh, Foutse, Dakhel, Arghavan Moradi, Nikanjam, Amin, Hamdaqa, Mohammad, Nafi, Kawser Wazed
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Jamshidi, Saeid
Khomh, Foutse
Dakhel, Arghavan Moradi
Nikanjam, Amin
Hamdaqa, Mohammad
Nafi, Kawser Wazed
author_facet Jamshidi, Saeid
Khomh, Foutse
Dakhel, Arghavan Moradi
Nikanjam, Amin
Hamdaqa, Mohammad
Nafi, Kawser Wazed
contents Evaluating the ethical robustness of large language models (LLMs) deployed in software systems remains challenging, particularly under sustained adversarial user interaction. Existing safety benchmarks typically rely on single-round evaluations and aggregate metrics, such as toxicity scores and refusal rates, which offer limited visibility into behavioral instability that may arise during realistic multi-turn interactions. As a result, rare but high-impact ethical failures and progressive degradation effects may remain undetected prior to deployment. This paper introduces Adversarial Moral Stress Testing (AMST), a stress-based evaluation framework for assessing ethical robustness under adversarial multi-round interactions. AMST applies structured stress transformations to prompts and evaluates model behavior through distribution-aware robustness metrics that capture variance, tail risk, and temporal behavioral drift across interaction rounds. We evaluate AMST on several state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA-3-8B, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek-v3, using a large set of adversarial scenarios generated under controlled stress conditions. The results demonstrate substantial differences in robustness profiles across models and expose degradation patterns that are not observable under conventional single-round evaluation protocols. In particular, robustness has been shown to depend on distributional stability and tail behavior rather than on average performance alone. Additionally, AMST provides a scalable and model-agnostic stress-testing methodology that enables robustness-aware evaluation and monitoring of LLM-enabled software systems operating in adversarial environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01108
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Moral Stress Testing of Large Language Models
Jamshidi, Saeid
Khomh, Foutse
Dakhel, Arghavan Moradi
Nikanjam, Amin
Hamdaqa, Mohammad
Nafi, Kawser Wazed
Artificial Intelligence
Evaluating the ethical robustness of large language models (LLMs) deployed in software systems remains challenging, particularly under sustained adversarial user interaction. Existing safety benchmarks typically rely on single-round evaluations and aggregate metrics, such as toxicity scores and refusal rates, which offer limited visibility into behavioral instability that may arise during realistic multi-turn interactions. As a result, rare but high-impact ethical failures and progressive degradation effects may remain undetected prior to deployment. This paper introduces Adversarial Moral Stress Testing (AMST), a stress-based evaluation framework for assessing ethical robustness under adversarial multi-round interactions. AMST applies structured stress transformations to prompts and evaluates model behavior through distribution-aware robustness metrics that capture variance, tail risk, and temporal behavioral drift across interaction rounds. We evaluate AMST on several state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA-3-8B, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek-v3, using a large set of adversarial scenarios generated under controlled stress conditions. The results demonstrate substantial differences in robustness profiles across models and expose degradation patterns that are not observable under conventional single-round evaluation protocols. In particular, robustness has been shown to depend on distributional stability and tail behavior rather than on average performance alone. Additionally, AMST provides a scalable and model-agnostic stress-testing methodology that enables robustness-aware evaluation and monitoring of LLM-enabled software systems operating in adversarial environments.
title Adversarial Moral Stress Testing of Large Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01108