arXiv AI

NeuroBreak: Unveil Internal Jailbreak Mechanisms in Large Language Models

arXiv:2509. 03985v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In deployment and application, large language models (LLMs) typically undergo safety alignment to prevent illegal and unethical outputs.

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
Aug 28

NeuronFuzz: Safety Neuron Guided Fuzzing for LLM Safety Evaluation

NeuronFuzz is a white‑box fuzzing framework that uses internal safety neurons of large language models as continuous feedback for safety evaluation, eliminating the need to generate full model responses during testing. It constructs a SafetyOracle that converts neuron activations into a differentiable safety alarm score, enabling gradient‑based identification of sensitive template positions and fluent, context‑compatible prompt mutations. Evaluated on 21 text and multimodal models, NeuronFuzz achieves a 76‑100% jailbreak discovery rate on five white‑box source models and demonstrates strong zero‑shot transfer to open‑weight and proprietary targets.

By Zhiyuan Xu, Muhammad Firhard Roslan, Joseph Gardiner, Sana Belguith, Lichao Wu
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 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