Response-time linear probing on first generated tokens detects prefilling attacks missed by prompt-time activation defenses, achieving 0/40 attack success and 0% false positives across seven models while composing orthogonally with AlphaSteer.
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AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Models
Canonical reference. 71% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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abstract
The aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful language understanding and decision-making tools that are created through extensive alignment with human feedback. However, these large models remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to elicit malicious outputs that should not be given by aligned LLMs. Investigating jailbreak prompts can lead us to delve into the limitations of LLMs and further guide us to secure them. Unfortunately, existing jailbreak techniques suffer from either (1) scalability issues, where attacks heavily rely on manual crafting of prompts, or (2) stealthiness problems, as attacks depend on token-based algorithms to generate prompts that are often semantically meaningless, making them susceptible to detection through basic perplexity testing. In light of these challenges, we intend to answer this question: Can we develop an approach that can automatically generate stealthy jailbreak prompts? In this paper, we introduce AutoDAN, a novel jailbreak attack against aligned LLMs. AutoDAN can automatically generate stealthy jailbreak prompts by the carefully designed hierarchical genetic algorithm. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AutoDAN not only automates the process while preserving semantic meaningfulness, but also demonstrates superior attack strength in cross-model transferability, and cross-sample universality compared with the baseline. Moreover, we also compare AutoDAN with perplexity-based defense methods and show that AutoDAN can bypass them effectively.
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- abstract The aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful language understanding and decision-making tools that are created through extensive alignment with human feedback. However, these large models remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to elicit malicious outputs that should not be given by aligned LLMs. Investigating jailbreak prompts can lead us to delve into the limitations of LLMs and further guide us to secure them. Unfortunately, existing jailbreak techniques suffer from either (1) scalability issues, where attacks heavily rely on manual crafting of
co-cited works
representative citing papers
LASH adaptively composes multiple jailbreak seed prompts via genetic search over subsets and mixture weights to reach 84.5% keyword ASR and 74.5% two-stage ASR on JailbreakBench while using only 30 queries per prompt.
FlowSteer is a prompt-only attack that biases multi-agent LLM workflow planning to propagate malicious signals, raising success rates by up to 55%, with FlowGuard as an input-side defense reducing it by up to 34%.
Jailbreak evaluations must report distributional statistics such as Variant Sensitivity Measure and Union Coverage across parameter variants rather than single best-case attack success rates.
Persona-driven workflow and interface improve automated and human-AI red-teaming of generative AI by incorporating diverse perspectives into adversarial prompt creation.
TAGO performs sparse jailbreak optimization on audio LMs by retaining only high-gradient-energy tokens, preserving near-full ASR at 25% retention across three models.
ContextualJailbreak uses evolutionary search over simulated primed dialogues with novel mutations to reach 90-100% attack success on open LLMs and transfers to some closed frontier models at 15-90% rates.
Causal tracing reveals a persistent Refusal Trajectory in LLM hidden states; SALO detector using sparse activations from a layer window improves jailbreak detection across Qwen, Llama, and Mistral models.
RouteHijack is a routing-aware jailbreak that identifies safety-critical experts via activation contrast and optimizes suffixes to suppress them, reaching 69.3% average attack success rate on seven MoE LLMs with strong transfer to variants and VLMs.
Jailbreak-induced performance loss shrinks as model capability grows, with the strongest models showing almost no degradation on benchmarks.
A new 7x4 taxonomy organizes agentic AI security threats by architectural layer and persistence timescale, revealing under-explored upper layers and missing defenses after surveying 116 papers.
A novel function hijacking attack achieves 70-100% success rates in forcing specific function calls across five LLMs on the BFCL benchmark and is robust to context semantics.
STAR-Teaming uses a Strategy-Response Multiplex Network inside a multi-agent framework to organize attack strategies into semantic communities, delivering higher attack success rates on LLMs at lower computational cost than prior methods.
HMNS is a new jailbreak method that uses causal head identification and nullspace-constrained injection to achieve higher attack success rates than prior techniques on aligned language models.
PrecisionDiff is a differential testing framework that uncovers widespread precision-induced behavioral disagreements in aligned LLMs, including safety-critical jailbreak divergences across precision formats.
Refusal in language models is mediated by a single direction in residual stream activations that can be erased to disable safety or added to elicit refusal.
Crescendo is a multi-turn escalation jailbreak that achieves high success rates on GPT-4, Gemini, Llama, and Claude by building on the model's prior responses, with an automated tool outperforming prior attacks on AdvBench.
SEAR trains one LLM via adversarial process rewards to explore harmful reasoning paths but flip to safe outputs, reducing over-refusal while preserving safety.
A narrative survey that catalogs fifty papers on diffusion-based adversarial techniques across text, vision, and vision-language models, proposes a six-class taxonomy of diffusion roles plus a unified five-dimension evaluation framework, and releases a companion catalog.
TSJ longitudinal simulation framework finds that short-term AI safety tests underestimate developmental risks, with early childhood and emerging adulthood as most vulnerable stages across cognitive trust and emotional dependency.
Contrastive Logit Steering isolates a linear refusal direction in safety-aligned LLMs, achieving higher jailbreak success than activation steering and enabling bidirectional control without retraining.
Applies MAP-Elites quality-diversity optimization to evolve semantic attack strategies across dimensions like strategy type, encoding, and length, uncovering distinct vulnerability profiles in four LLMs including GPT-4o-mini and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
TRACE is a task-aware adaptive self-evolving jailbreaking framework that achieves up to 100% bypass rates on LLM agents via subtask decomposition and scenario evolution.
Genetic algorithm prompt generation enables prompt injection into binaries via string assignments to fool LLM-powered decompilers and disassemblers.
citing papers explorer
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FlowSteer: Prompt-Only Workflow Steering Exposes Planning-Time Vulnerabilities in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
FlowSteer is a prompt-only attack that biases multi-agent LLM workflow planning to propagate malicious signals, raising success rates by up to 55%, with FlowGuard as an input-side defense reducing it by up to 34%.
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PersonaTeaming: Supporting Persona-Driven Red-Teaming for Generative AI
Persona-driven workflow and interface improve automated and human-AI red-teaming of generative AI by incorporating diverse perspectives into adversarial prompt creation.
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ContextualJailbreak: Evolutionary Red-Teaming via Simulated Conversational Priming
ContextualJailbreak uses evolutionary search over simulated primed dialogues with novel mutations to reach 90-100% attack success on open LLMs and transfers to some closed frontier models at 15-90% rates.
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A Systematic Survey of Security Threats and Defenses in LLM-Based AI Agents: A Layered Attack Surface Framework
A new 7x4 taxonomy organizes agentic AI security threats by architectural layer and persistence timescale, revealing under-explored upper layers and missing defenses after surveying 116 papers.
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Jailbreaking the Matrix: Nullspace Steering for Controlled Model Subversion
HMNS is a new jailbreak method that uses causal head identification and nullspace-constrained injection to achieve higher attack success rates than prior techniques on aligned language models.
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Hidden Reliability Risks in Large Language Models: Systematic Identification of Precision-Induced Output Disagreements
PrecisionDiff is a differential testing framework that uncovers widespread precision-induced behavioral disagreements in aligned LLMs, including safety-critical jailbreak divergences across precision formats.
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MT-JailBench: A Modular Benchmark for Understanding Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks
MT-JailBench is a modular benchmark that standardizes evaluation of multi-turn jailbreaks to identify key success drivers and enable stronger combined attacks.
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Disentangling Intent from Role: Adversarial Self-Play for Persona-Invariant Safety Alignment
PIA achieves lower attack success rates on persona-based jailbreaks via self-play co-evolution of attacks (PLE) and defenses (PICL) that structurally decouples safety from persona context using unilateral KL-divergence.
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Catching the Infection Before It Spreads: Foresight-Guided Defense in Multi-Agent Systems
FLP uses multi-persona foresight simulation to detect infections via response diversity and applies local purification to reduce maximum cumulative infection rates in multi-agent systems from over 95% to below 5.47%.
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FlashRT: Towards Computationally and Memory Efficient Red-Teaming for Prompt Injection and Knowledge Corruption
FlashRT delivers 2x-7x speedup and 2x-4x GPU memory reduction for prompt injection and knowledge corruption attacks on long-context LLMs versus nanoGCG.
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The Salami Slicing Threat: Exploiting Cumulative Risks in LLM Systems
Salami Attack chains low-risk inputs to cumulatively trigger high-risk LLM behaviors, achieving over 90% success on GPT-4o and Gemini while resisting some defenses.
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Dictionary-Aligned Concept Control for Safeguarding Multimodal LLMs
DACO curates a 15,000-concept dictionary from 400K image-caption pairs and uses it to initialize an SAE that enables granular, concept-specific steering of MLLM activations, raising safety scores on MM-SafetyBench and JailBreakV while preserving general capabilities.
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TrajGuard: Streaming Hidden-state Trajectory Detection for Decoding-time Jailbreak Defense
TrajGuard detects jailbreaks by tracking how hidden-state trajectories move toward high-risk regions during decoding, achieving 95% defense rate with 5.2 ms/token latency across tested attacks.
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SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks
SmoothLLM mitigates jailbreaking attacks on LLMs by randomly perturbing multiple copies of a prompt at the character level and aggregating the outputs to detect adversarial inputs.
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From AI-Generated Content to Agentic Action: Security and Safety Threats in Generative AI
The paper analyzes evolving security and safety threats in generative AI from content generation to agentic actions, noting that attack surfaces expand faster than defenses and that many safeguards require institutional coordination not yet in place.
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Beyond Context: Large Language Models' Failure to Grasp Users' Intent
LLMs fail to detect hidden harmful intent, allowing systematic bypass of safety mechanisms through framing techniques, with reasoning modes often worsening the issue.
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Harmful Fine-tuning Attacks and Defenses for Large Language Models: A Survey
Survey of harmful fine-tuning attacks on LLMs, their variants, defense strategies, mechanical analysis, and evaluation methodologies.
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Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models
The paper reviews the background, technology, applications, limitations, and future directions of OpenAI's Sora text-to-video generative model based on public information.