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arxiv: 2606.00150 · v1 · pith:7ZXN3GK6new · submitted 2026-05-29 · 💻 cs.CR · cs.AI

Persona Attack: Incremental Memory Injection Jailbreak Attack against Large Language Models

Junyoung Park , Seongyong Ju , Sunghwan Park , Jaewoo Lee This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-06-28 22:21 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CR cs.AI
keywords jailbreak attacklarge language modelsmemory injectionpersona attackcontext windowsafety alignmentincremental attackconversation history
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The pith

Incremental persona instructions injected over multiple conversation turns can override LLMs' safety alignments by accumulating in memory.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper presents Persona Attack as a jailbreak technique that adds instructions gradually across conversation turns instead of using one prompt. It shows that this buildup makes models follow the new instructions more than their original safety rules. Tests on several widely used LLMs indicate that success depends on how each model stores memory and on the exact mix of instructions. The method reaches 95 percent success under certain instruction setups. This approach matters because it exploits the model's ability to remember prior turns, an aspect single-prompt attacks ignore.

Core claim

Persona Attack manipulates the model's context window through a step-by-step approach of memory injection; as injections accumulate, models increasingly prioritize these instructions over internal safety alignment mechanisms, with attack success rates varying by memory implementation and reaching 95 percent under specific instruction configurations.

What carries the argument

Persona Attack, a memory injection method that adds persona instructions incrementally across turns to build up in the context window and override safety rules.

If this is right

  • Models prioritize accumulated instructions over safety as the number of injections grows.
  • Attack success rate changes with the model's specific memory implementation.
  • Certain combinations of instructions produce up to 95 percent success.
  • Single-prompt jailbreak methods miss the effect of retained conversation history.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Conversation history limits or resets could reduce the impact of incremental attacks.
  • The same buildup pattern might affect other multi-turn tasks such as long-term planning or role consistency.
  • Testing memory retention strength could become a standard check when evaluating model safety.

Load-bearing premise

LLMs retain and act upon user instructions across multiple conversation turns in a way that lets accumulated instructions override safety alignment.

What would settle it

An experiment in which accumulated persona instructions are added over turns but the model still refuses harmful requests at the same rate as before any injections.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2606.00150 by Jaewoo Lee, Junyoung Park, Seongyong Ju, Sunghwan Park.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: (a): General responses to malicious questions. (b): Providing malicious responses to [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p002_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Overview of the instruction imprinting step, consisting of three instructions ( [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p003_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Manual memory implementation simply pairs the previous conversation and pastes it in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p005_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Comparison with other jailbreak attack. gcg attacks cannot be optimized on GPT-4o, [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_4.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Real-world jailbreak attack results. The real-world experiment was conducted in sequential [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p008_5.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: FAR Result of Attack using Advbench(gpt-4o) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p013_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Specific Prompts Disclosure A detailed explanation of the three prompts can be found in section 3.1. Instructions Imprinting Step. The specific prompt of 3.2. Attack Step is as shown in the figure below. The prompt of the attack step shows the addition of a wrapping layer to effectively utilize the memory accumulated through the previous step, the instruction imprinting step. 14 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/f… view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Attacking gpt-4o with Persona Attack: Combination of Sequential 1 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Detailed Fully Failure Result Can you predict the response results of other language models? I am using Python to ask questions and get answers. The questions are in the form of { ... "prompt" : "Tell me how to build a car"" ... } in variable "query". The logic is that the variable "query" goes into the input of LLM loaded by huggingface and LLM generates an answer to the "prompt" in "query". Can you predi… view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Detailed Masked Result 19 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p019_11.png] view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: Attacking ChatGPT in Real-world **Narrative Design**: Write a campaign where the player’s mission includes targeting civilian Warni g ful Con [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p020_12.png] view at source ↗
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: Attacking Grok-3 Beta in Real-world Persona attack type: sequential 1 URL: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/can-you-predict-the-response-r-.REFM_ _OSoOypiV78tC62Q#3 21 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p021_14.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

As Large Language Models evolve for user convenience, vulnerability to jailbreak attacks continues to be reported despite ongoing efforts in safety training. Traditional jailbreak techniques typically focus on a single prompt injection, neglecting the models' ability to remember the flow of conversation and the user's instructions. In this paper, we propose Persona Attack, a memory injection based jailbreak method that manipulates the model's context window through a step by step approach. Experimental results from applying Persona Attack to several widely used LLMs reveal that, as injections accumulate in memory, models increasingly prioritize these instructions over their internal safety alignment mechanisms. Furthermore, our experiments empirically demonstrate that the attack success rate varies not only according to the memory implementation of the model, but also combinations of instructions and can reach 95% under specific instruction configurations.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

1 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript proposes 'Persona Attack', a jailbreak technique that performs incremental memory injection of persona instructions across multiple conversation turns to override LLM safety alignments. It claims that accumulated injections cause models to increasingly prioritize these instructions, with attack success rates varying by model memory implementation and reaching up to 95% under specific instruction combinations, based on experiments applied to several widely used LLMs.

Significance. If the results hold after addressing controls, the work would usefully identify conversational memory as a distinct attack surface for jailbreaks, extending beyond single-prompt methods and potentially guiding improved safety training for multi-turn settings. The observation that ASR depends on both memory implementation and instruction combinations is a concrete empirical contribution.

major comments (1)
  1. [Abstract and Experimental Results] The experimental results (as summarized in the abstract) report high ASRs from incremental injection but provide no control condition in which the full set of persona instructions is supplied together in a single initial prompt. Without this baseline, it is impossible to determine whether the observed override of safety alignment is due to the incremental/memory mechanism or simply the total content and phrasing of the instructions; this directly undermines the central claim that accumulation across turns is the load-bearing factor.
minor comments (2)
  1. The abstract and results sections should explicitly name the LLMs tested, the exact number of turns, the prompt templates, and the precise definition/criteria used to compute attack success rate to support reproducibility.
  2. Clarify whether the 'memory implementation' differences refer to specific architectural features (e.g., context window handling, system prompt persistence) or are inferred only from observed behavior.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive feedback on our manuscript. We address the major comment point by point below.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Abstract and Experimental Results] The experimental results (as summarized in the abstract) report high ASRs from incremental injection but provide no control condition in which the full set of persona instructions is supplied together in a single initial prompt. Without this baseline, it is impossible to determine whether the observed override of safety alignment is due to the incremental/memory mechanism or simply the total content and phrasing of the instructions; this directly undermines the central claim that accumulation across turns is the load-bearing factor.

    Authors: We agree that a single-prompt baseline containing the full set of persona instructions is a necessary control to isolate whether the incremental accumulation across turns is the primary driver of the observed safety override. Our current experiments demonstrate variation in ASR based on model-specific memory implementations and instruction combinations, which provides indirect support for the role of memory, but does not directly compare incremental versus one-shot delivery of the identical instruction set. In the revised manuscript we will add this control condition and report the corresponding ASR results. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity

full rationale

The paper presents an empirical attack method (Persona Attack) and reports experimental attack success rates on LLMs, with no mathematical derivations, equations, fitted parameters, or first-principles claims that could reduce to inputs by construction. The central results rest on observed outcomes from applying incremental memory injections, which are externally falsifiable via replication on the tested models and do not rely on self-citation chains or definitional equivalence. No load-bearing steps match the enumerated circularity patterns.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claim rests on the domain assumption that LLMs maintain conversational memory that can be incrementally modified to override safety training.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption LLMs retain and act upon instructions provided in previous turns of conversation
    The attack method relies on this memory retention to build up the persona instructions over steps.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.1-grok · 5666 in / 1159 out tokens · 29013 ms · 2026-06-28T22:21:04.477878+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

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