Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful candidates for complex decision-making, leveraging vast encoded knowledge and remarkable zero-shot abilities. However, their adoption in high-stakes environments is hindered by their opacity; their outputs lack faithful explanations and cannot be effectively contested to correct errors, undermining trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose ART (Adaptive Reasoning Trees), a hierarchical method for claim verification. The process begins with a root claim, which branches into supporting and attacking child arguments. An argument’s strength is determined bottom-up via a pairwise tournament of its children, adjudicated by a judge LLM, allowing a final, transparent and contestable verdict to be systematically derived which is missing in methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We empirically validate ART on multiple datasets, analyzing different argument generators and comparison strategies. Our findings show that ART’s structured reasoning outperforms strong baselines, establishing a new benchmark for explainable claim verification which is more reliable and ensures clarity in the overall decision making step.

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents significant privacy, security, and ethical concerns. While much research has proposed methods for defending LLM systems against misuse by malicious actors, researchers have recently complemented these efforts with an offensive approach that involves red teaming, i.e., proactively attacking LLMs with the purpose of identifying their vulnerabilities. This paper provides a concise and practical overview of the LLM red teaming literature, structured so as to describe a multi-component system end-to-end. To motivate red teaming we survey the initial safety needs of some high-profile LLMs, and then dive into the different components of a red teaming system as well as software packages for implementing them. We cover various attack methods, strategies for attack-success evaluation, metrics for assessing experiment outcomes, as well as a host of other considerations. Our survey will be useful for any reader who wants to rapidly obtain a grasp of the major red teaming concepts for their own use in practical applications.