AST 2025
Sat 26 April - Sun 4 May 2025 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
co-located with ICSE 2025

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 29 Apr 2025 14:30 - 15:00 at 211 - Session 5: Testing of LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their ability to understand and generate sophisticated human-like content. However, ensuring their safety is paramount as they might provide harmful and unsafe responses. Existing LLM testing frameworks address various safety-related concerns (e.g., drugs, terrorism, animal abuse) but often face challenges due to unbalanced and obsolete datasets. In this paper, we present \tool, a tool that automates the generation and execution of test cases (i.e., prompts) for testing the safety of LLMs. First, we introduce a novel black-box coverage criterion to generate balanced and diverse unsafe test inputs across a diverse set of safety categories as well as linguistic writing characteristics (i.e. different style and persuasive writing techniques). Second, we propose an LLM-based approach that leverages Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), few-shot prompting strategies and web browsing to generate up-to-date test inputs. Lastly, similar to current LLM test automation techniques, we leverage LLMs as test oracles to distinguish between safe and unsafe test outputs, allowing a fully automated testing approach. We conduct an extensive evaluation on well-known LLMs, revealing the following key findings: i) GPT3.5 outperforms other LLMs when acting as the test oracle, accurately detecting unsafe responses, and even surpassing more recent LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), as well as LLMs that are specifically tailored to detect unsafe LLM outputs (e.g., LlamaGuard); ii) the results confirm that our approach can uncover nearly twice as many unsafe LLM behaviors with the same number of test inputs compared to currently used static datasets; and iii) our black-box coverage criterion combined with web browsing can effectively guide the LLM on generating up-to-date unsafe prompts, significantly increasing the number of test inputs that lead to an unsafe LLM output.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 29 Apr

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

14:00 - 15:30
Session 5: Testing of LLMsAST 2025 at 211
14:00
30m
Full-paper
Adaptive Probabilistic Operational Testing for Large Language Models Evaluation
AST 2025
Ali Asgari TU Delft, Antonio Guerriero Università di Napoli Federico II, Roberto Pietrantuono Università di Napoli Federico II, Stefano Russo Università di Napoli Federico II
14:30
30m
Full-paper
ASTRAL: Automated Safety Testing of Large Language Models
AST 2025
Miriam Ugarte Mondragon University, Pablo Valle Mondragon University, José Antonio Parejo Maestre University of Seville, Sergio Segura University of Seville, Aitor Arrieta Mondragon University
Pre-print
15:00
30m
Full-paper
A Taxonomy of Failures in Tool-Augmented LLMs
AST 2025
Cailin Winston University of Washington, René Just University of Washington