Learning to Inject: Automated Prompt Injection via Reinforcement Learning

Xin Chen, Jie Zhang and Florian Tramèr

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2026



Abstract

Prompt injection is one of the most critical vulnerabilities in LLM agents; yet, effective automated attacks remain largely unexplored from an optimization perspective. Existing methods heavily depend on human red-teamers and hand-crafted prompts, limiting their scalability and adaptability. We propose AutoInject, a reinforcement learning framework that generates universal, transferable adversarial suffixes while jointly optimizing for attack success and utility preservation on benign tasks. Our black-box method supports both query-based optimization and transfer attacks to unseen models and tasks. Using only a 1.5B parameter adversarial suffix generator, we successfully compromise frontier systems including GPT 5 Nano, Claude Sonnet 3.5, and Gemini 2.5 Flash on the AgentDojo benchmark, establishing a stronger baseline for automated prompt injection research.


BibTeX
@inproceedings{CZT26,
  author   =   {Chen, Xin and Zhang, Jie and Tram{\`e}r, Florian},
  title   =   {Learning to Inject: Automated Prompt Injection via Reinforcement Learning},
  booktitle   =   {Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year   =   {2026},
  howpublished   =   {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.05746},
  url   =   {https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05746}
}