arXiv Machine Learning

PatchBench: Measuring Collateral Damage in Activation Patching

PatchBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate the collateral damage of activation patching in large language models, particularly for jailbreak repairs. It curates 400 high‑confidence jailbreak failures from 27,870 prompts across 37 datasets and introduces PatchBench‑Local, an evaluation protocol that tests whether a patch corrects harmful prompts while preserving benign ones. The study shows that aggregate metrics can miss severe local regressions, highlighting the need for more precise evaluation methods.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

MLCommons Jailbreak Benchmark v1.0

MLCommons Jailbreak Benchmark v1.0 is a new methodology for assessing how well large language models resist single‑turn, text‑based jailbreak attacks. It evaluates eight open‑weight systems with 264 seed prompts across eleven hazard categories, using the AILuminate Assessment Standard v1.4 to measure the Resilience Gap—the difference in safety performance between baseline and adversarial conditions. The benchmark found that unsafe‑response rates rose from 11.08% to 18.65% under jailbreak conditions, yielding an average Resilience Gap of 7.57% and highlighting variability in attack effectiveness and evaluator reliability.

By Carsten Maple (Victor), Cagatay Yucel (Victor), Isaac Holeman (Victor), Chris Knotz (Victor), Peter Mattson (Victor), James Goel (Victor), Jonathan Petit (Victor), Sean McGregor (Victor), James Ezick (Victor), Abhishek Kumar (Victor), Alicia Parrish (Victor), Murali Emani (Victor), Kashyap Iyer (Victor), Faiza Khan Khattak (Victor), Washington Mbonu (Victor), Daniel Machlab (Victor), Eileen Long (Victor), Shaona Ghosh (Victor), Jibin Varghese (Victor), Roman Lutz (Victor), Andrew Gruen (Victor), Bennett Hillenbrand (Victor), Prabal Gupta (Victor), Mohammed Serrhini (Victor), Dhivya Nagasubramanian (Victor), Aakash Gupta (Victor), Jun (Victor), Lu, Kurt Bollacker, Chang Liu, Jonathan Petit, Cong Chen, Jean-Philippe Monteuuis, Brent Miller, Apurv Verma, Roman Eng, Armstrong Foundjem, Mohammed Serrhini
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 AI
Aug 20

Jailbreaking in the Haystack

The paper "Jailbreaking in the Haystack" introduces NINJA, a jailbreak technique that exploits long-context language models by appending benign, model-generated content to harmful user goals. It demonstrates that the position of harmful goals within the context is crucial for safety, and shows that NINJA significantly boosts attack success rates on models such as LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini. Unlike previous methods, NINJA is low-resource, transferable, less detectable, and compute‑optimal, revealing that carefully crafted benign long contexts can expose fundamental vulnerabilities in modern LMs.

By Rishi Rajesh Shah, Chen Henry Wu, Shashwat Saxena, Ziqian Zhong, Alexander Robey, Aditi Raghunathan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Validity-Aware Jailbreak Evaluation for Large Language Models

The paper introduces SEAV, a verification‑centric framework for evaluating jailbreak attempts against large language models. SEAV decomposes responses into ordered steps and checks both validity and correctness using LLM‑as‑a‑judge and retrieval‑grounded verification. The method reduces false positives by 14.9 percentage points on a strategic‑dishonesty diagnostic and reclassifies 22.1–51.0% of previously successful jailbreaks as invalid across multiple benchmarks.

By Qilong Wu, Sahil Wadhwa, Pranab Mohanty, Giri Iyengar, Varun Chandrasekaran