arXiv AI
Oct 7

Jailbreaking Open-Weight LLMs via Random Embedding Perturbations

arXiv:2610.07125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While open-weight models have enjoyed steady progress in capabilities and wide adoption across multiple domains, their safety remains an important co...

By Abhinav Sudhakar Dubey (University of California Santa Cruz), Scott Sirri (University of California Santa Cruz), Vaggos Chatziafratis (University of California Santa Cruz), C. Seshadhri (University of California Santa Cruz)
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Expected Harm: Rethinking Safety Evaluation of (Mis)Aligned LLMs

The paper critiques current LLM safety evaluations that rely solely on severity taxonomies, arguing they ignore the probability that a threat will actually be executed. It introduces Expected Harm, a metric that multiplies severity by execution likelihood—modeled via execution cost—to better gauge real-world risk. Empirical studies show that models over‑refuse low‑likelihood, high‑cost threats while remaining vulnerable to high‑likelihood, low‑cost ones, a miscalibration traced to the distribution of safety examples in supervised fine‑tuning. This misalignment can be exploited to double the success rate of jailbreak attacks.

By Yen-Shan Chen, Zhi Rui Tam, Cheng-Kuang Wu, Yun-Nung Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Refusal Is Not Robustness: Measuring Harmful Reachability in Autoregressive Language Models

The paper introduces Bounded Continuation Analysis (BCA), a method that models autoregressive language model generation as a stochastic process over token prefixes to compute the finite‑horizon probability of reaching a harmful continuation. BCA builds a bounded continuation tree, labels terminal continuations with a semantic harm evaluator, and uses exact probabilistic model checking to estimate harmful reachability. Unlike traditional attack success rate (ASR) metrics that only assess sampled outputs, BCA reveals hidden harmful paths that may coexist with safe responses, enabling more precise red‑team targeting across instruction‑tuned LLMs and JailbreakBench behaviors.

By Parv Kapoor, Teresa Fortes, Claudia Mamede, Rui Abreu, Jonathan Aldrich, Eunsuk Kang
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Dynamic Jailbreaking Attack

arXiv:2510. 02422v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks typically optimize a fixed-length adversarial suffix toward a predefined target response with a static optimization strategy.

By Kedong Xiu, Yunhan Yang, Churui Zeng, Tianhang Zheng, Xinzhe Huang, Di Wang, Puning Zhao, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren