arXiv Computation and Language

Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization for Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs

arXiv AI
Jun 11

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

arXiv:2606. 11425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target queries.

By Ge Shi, Jun Yin, Donglin Xie, Fangyi Liu, Yucan Li, Menglin Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 7

AlcaTRAz - Anchored Tree-Rule Defense Against Jailbreaks

AlcaTRAz is a prompt‑level defense that uses rule trees to insert controlled character‑level perturbations into input text, disrupting jailbreak attacks without modifying or retraining the target LLM. It operates solely on the input, making it suitable for black‑box deployments, and was evaluated on 33 open‑weight models and 22 jailbreak types, outperforming three baseline defenses in 73.4 % of model‑attack combinations. While it significantly reduces high‑severity jailbreak success, it does not eliminate it and is intended as one layer of a broader defense strategy.

By Jakub Re\v{s}, Petr Ka\v{s}ka, Martin Pere\v{s}\'ini, Martin Ukrop, Kamil Malinka
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

A Single Suffix to Break Them All: Basin-Aware Jailbreaks for Merged Model Families

The paper investigates safety risks in model merging, showing that even when all constituent models are individually safety‑aligned, merging can expose a jailbreak vulnerability rooted in the pretrained foundation model. It introduces Basin‑Aware Jailbreak (BAJ), a min–max optimization method that generates adversarial suffixes transferable across merged models sharing the same backbone, without needing the exact merging coefficients or checkpoints. Experiments demonstrate BAJ’s high transfer success rates across diverse backbones and merging settings, and its resilience against existing defenses.

By Yu Zhe, Yixin Tan, Junhao Wei, Wang Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 23

JailMeter: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Framework for Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The assessment of jailbreak attacks against large language models currently suffers from inconsistent evaluation criteria and methods, leading to unreliable estimates of attack success rates.

By Qingjia Huang, Jingyu Zhang, Jianguo Wu, Yakai Li, Weijuan Zhang, Yankai Rong, Junyi Yao, Shengzhi Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework Defense against LLM Jailbreak Attacks

The paper introduces a self‑evolving defense framework for large language models that uses a persistent, cross‑interaction rule memory to adapt to new jailbreak attacks. When an attack succeeds, the system abstracts the failure into a method‑level rule that captures the structural attack wrapper, allowing the rule to generalize across an entire attack family. This memory‑based adaptation operates without parameter updates, works with both open‑weight and black‑box models, and has been shown to reduce attack success rates while preserving benign utility across multiple jailbreak families.

By Tongyan Hu, Bryan Hooi