MapSteal: Map-based Autonomous Knowledge Stealing Attack Against Large Language Models

Summary

MapSteal is a student-independent framework that recursively extracts question-answer pairs from black-box LLMs under a fixed QA budget, using structured acquisition states and root-aware scheduling. Experiments with Qwen3.5 students at 2B, 4B and 9B scales reach competitive downstream performance across six medical and cybersecurity benchmarks. On the 4B medical evaluation, Full MapSteal improves average accuracy by 1.17 percentage points over a simplified recursive variant, though gains vary by domain and evaluation panel.

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