arXiv Computation and Language By Yuna Park, Hwang Youn Kim, Yujin Kim, Won Woo Ro, Suhyun Kim, Jae-In Hwang

The Fragility of Jailbreak Robustness Across Operational States

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The study shows that jailbreak robustness in language models is highly sensitive to operational-state changes. Even minor alterations to system prompts, not intended to affect safety, can dramatically shift attack success rates across seven aligned models and three jailbreak methods. The authors link these variations to changes in hidden representations along a refusal-related axis, which can predict jailbreak outcomes.

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