🌐 Project Page | 🤖 Model Collection | 📊 Benchmark Collection | 📘 Data Collection
Official repository for "RedSage: A Cybersecurity Generalist LLM" (ICLR 2026).
Authors: Naufal Suryanto1, Muzammal Naseer1†, Pengfei Li1, Syed Talal Wasim2, Jinhui Yi2, Juergen Gall2, Paolo Ceravolo3, Ernesto Damiani3
1Khalifa University, 2Universität Bonn, 3University of Milan
†Project Lead
- News
- Introduction
- Model Lineup
- Getting Started
- Build with RedSage
- Data
- Evaluation
- Responsible Use
- Citation
- 2026-01-26: Our paper has been accepted to ICLR 2026! We will release all the code, models, and datasets gradually. Please stay tuned!
- 2026-01-14: Added inference, deployment, and evaluation code (except OpenQA).
- 2025-10-14: Update the README.md
We are releasing RedSage sequentially in four phases. Track progress here (we’ll keep this list updated).
View checklist
- Publish
RedSage-Qwen3-8B-DPOon Hugging Face (weights + model card) - Publish
RedSage-Qwen3-8B-Inson Hugging Face (weights + model card) - Publish
RedSage-Qwen3-8B-Baseon Hugging Face (weights + model card) - Publish
RedSage-Qwen3-8B-CFWon Hugging Face (weights + model card) - Publish
RedSage-Qwen3-8B-Seedon Hugging Face (weights + model card) - Provide
inference/hf_chat.py(Transformers chat example) - Provide
inference/vllm_demo.py(simple client) - Add vLLM serving guide in
docs/deploy/vllm.md
- Release RedSage-CFW on Hugging Face (datasets + card)
- Release RedSage-Seed on Hugging Face (datasets + card)
- Release RedSage-Conv on Hugging Face (datasets + card)
- Release cybersecurity-filtering code.
- Release agentic data augmentation code for generating multi-turn conversation from seed.
- Add
data/README.md(provenance, dedup, cleaning, TOS/licensing)
- Release RedSage-MCQ data and lighteval implementation
- Release lighteval task implementations for related Cybersecurity Benchmarks
- Provide
eval/run_lighteval.pyand example command lines - Release RedSage-OpenQA data and lighteval implementation
- Publish baseline results (RedSage variants + common 8B baselines)
- Add results table/plots to Docs
- Add Axolotl CPT (continual pretraining) notes/configs in
training/configs/cpt/ - Add Axolotl SFT config(s) in
training/configs/sft/ - Add Axolotl DPO config(s) in
training/configs/dpo/ - Provide
scripts/train_*.shrunners +acceleratetips - Document hardware requirements & expected throughput
RedSage is an open-source, 8B-scale cybersecurity assistant engineered to tackle complex security workflows without the privacy risks of proprietary APIs. By combining massive domain-specific pretraining with a novel agentic dialogue pipeline, RedSage provides a locally deployable expert for everything from threat analysis to vulnerability management.
- Cyber-Domain Intelligence: Built on CyberFineWeb, a curated 11.8B-token corpus of high-quality cybersecurity resources spanning frameworks, offensive techniques, and security tool documentation.
- Agentic Augmentation: Trained on 266,000 multi-turn dialogues generated by a specialized agentic pipeline that simulates "User-Expert" workflows to solve multi-step security challenges.
- SOTA Performance: Outperforms Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen3-8B by +5.59 points on cyber-benchmarks and +5.05 points on the Open LLM Leaderboard.
- Comprehensive Benchmarking: Introduced RedSage-Bench, a new evaluation suite with 30,000+ MCQs and 240 open-ended tasks to measure cybersecurity knowledge, skill, and tools.
- Privacy-First Deployment: Optimized for the 8B scale, RedSage supports private, on-premise deployment on consumer-grade GPUs—ensuring your sensitive security data never leaves your environment.
| Model | Type | Best For | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| RedSage-8B-Base | Base | Domain adaptation, further fine-tuning. | 🤗 Link |
| RedSage-8B-Ins | Instruct | Multi-turn chat, step-by-step security explanations. | 🤗 Link |
| RedSage-8B-DPO | Chat | Production-ready assistants with aligned behavior. | 🤗 Link |
Previous / Experimental Variants
- RedSage-Qwen3-8B-CFW (🤗 Model Card) — CPT on cybersecurity-filtered web only (ablation).
- RedSage-Qwen3-8B-Seed (🤗 Model Card) — CPT on curated seed sources only (ablation).
Install uv first if you don't have it yet (see https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/), then create an environment:
uv venv --python 3.12 --seed
source .venv/bin/activateInstall the tools you need with uv inside the env, for example:
uv pip install transformers torch acceleratefrom transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch
model_name = "RISys-Lab/RedSage-Qwen3-8B-Ins"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
model_name, torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="auto"
)
messages = [
{"role": "system", "content": "You are RedSage, a helpful cybersecurity assistant."},
{"role": "user", "content": "List three SSRF mitigations."}
]
text = tok.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
inputs = tok(text, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
out = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=300, temperature=0.2)
print(tok.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))Note:
-Ins/-DPOare non-thinking chat models; no<think>blocks.
For more examples, see inference/README.md which includes the full chat inference demo code.
RedSage is production-ready with vLLM for high-throughput, OpenAI-compatible serving.
Start a server:
uv pip install vllm --torch-backend=auto
vllm serve RISys-Lab/RedSage-Qwen3-8B-DPO --port 8000 --max-model-len 32768
# OpenAI-compatible API at http://localhost:8000/v1Call the API:
curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "RISys-Lab/RedSage-Qwen3-8B-DPO",
"messages": [
{"role": "system", "content": "You are RedSage, a helpful cybersecurity assistant."},
{"role": "user", "content": "Explain AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H."}
],
"temperature": 0.2,
"max_tokens": 512
}'- Use
--tensor-parallel-sizefor multi-GPU,--max-model-lenfor long contexts. - Prefer BF16/FP16 on recent GPUs; quantized weights will be linked in the collection if provided.
- Enable request batching in your gateway (nginx/Envoy) for best throughput.
For a comprehensive deployment guide, refer to docs/deploy/vllm.md.
See training/README.md for:
- CPT, SFT, & DPO workflows (Axolotl)
- Config references under
training/configs/ - Hardware/memory notes and troubleshooting
- Example run scripts in
scripts/
- Cybersecurity-filtered corpus with global dedup; includes a small general-domain replay to reduce forgetting.
- RedSage-Seed: curated Knowledge / Skills / Tools sources.
- RedSage-Conv: agentically generated, multi-turn, role-grounded dialogues with automatic validation.
Licenses and source notes are documented in data/README.md.
See eval/README.md for detailed instructions on:
- RedSage-Bench: 30K MCQs + 240 open-ended items with an LLM-as-judge rubric.
- Cybersecurity Benchmarks: CTI-Bench, CyberMetric, SecBench, SecEval, SECURE, MMLU-CSec.
# List all available tasks
python eval/run_lighteval.py --list-tasks
# Run a single benchmark
python eval/run_lighteval.py vllm \
--model RISys-Lab/RedSage-Qwen3-8B-DPO \
--tasks cybermetrics:500
# Run multiple benchmarks
python eval/run_lighteval.py vllm \
--model RISys-Lab/RedSage-Qwen3-8B-DPO \
--tasks cybermetrics:500,mmlu:cs_security,secbench:mcq-en \
--output-dir results/my_eval
# Run curated benchmarks (e.g, All RedSage-MCQs)
python eval/run_lighteval.py vllm \
--model RISys-Lab/RedSage-Qwen3-8B-DPO \
--tasks tasks/redsage_mcqs.txt \
--output-dir results/redsage_mcqRedSage is released for research and educational purposes only. It contains offensive security knowledge that must be used ethically. Users are responsible for ensuring compliance with local laws.
@inproceedings{suryanto2026redsage,
title={RedSage: A Cybersecurity Generalist {LLM}},
author={Suryanto, Naufal and Naseer, Muzammal and Li, Pengfei and Wasim, Syed Talal and Yi, Jinhui and Gall, Juergen and Ceravolo, Paolo and Damiani, Ernesto},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=W4FAenIrQ2},
}