Jailbreaking for the Average Jane: Choosing Optimal Jailbreaks via Bandit Algorithms for Automatically Enhanced Queries
Pith reviewed 2026-06-26 04:12 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
Bandit algorithms let non-experts select jailbreaks that succeed at up to 97 percent on 15 open LLMs.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
A multi-armed bandit attack learns the optimal jailbreak from noisy exploration on a small query set and applies the learned policy to a larger exploitation set, reaching success rates as high as 97 percent on average over 15 state-of-the-art open-weight LLMs; adding complexity to the queries raises success by up to 26 percent on average.
What carries the argument
Multi-armed bandit framework that performs online learning of the best jailbreak from a large choice set via limited exploration before exploitation.
If this is right
- Non-expert attackers can achieve high success rates without hand-crafting prompts for each target model.
- Increasing query complexity functions as an automatable way to improve attack performance across models.
- The risk posed by the public catalog of jailbreaks is shown to be practically realizable rather than merely theoretical.
- Automated selection methods can be applied to any large collection of candidate jailbreaks without requiring expert knowledge.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- The same bandit selection loop could be tested on closed models or on multimodal systems to check whether the observed success pattern holds.
- Defenses that only block fixed prompt templates may be insufficient once attackers learn to pick from many templates adaptively.
- The FrankensteinBench construction process could be reused to generate fresh test sets for evaluating future alignment techniques.
Load-bearing premise
The policy learned from noisy trials on a small set of queries will transfer to produce high success on a separate and larger collection of malicious queries.
What would settle it
Measure whether the policy selected after exploration on the small query set still yields high success rates when run on an entirely new, held-out collection of malicious queries against the same models.
Figures
read the original abstract
With a profusion of jailbreaks for LLMs now widely known, a growing concern is that non-expert malicious actors ("the average Jane") could elicit actionable responses to malicious requests. In this work, we examine whether this concern is justified. A non-expert malicious actor requires two ingredients for a successful attack: a powerful jailbreak for their target model, acting on an effective malicious query. For the former, we propose a novel attack strategy based on the multi-armed bandit framework. This allows efficient online learning of the optimal jailbreak from a large choice set via noisy exploration on a small number of queries, with subsequent application of the learnt policy on an exploitation set. For the latter, we curate $\mathrm{FrankensteinBench}$, a safety benchmark of $11,279$ malicious queries drawn from manual curation over $7$ existing benchmarks, along with automated enhancement and generation. Each query is categorized as simple or complex by the technical expertise required to craft it. Our findings confirm the concern. Our bandit-based attack achieves success rates as high as $97\%$ on average over $15$ SoTA open-weight LLMs. Moreover, adding complexity to queries raises the attack success rate by up to $26\%$ on average across models -- making it an effective, automatable prompting strategy.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper claims that a multi-armed bandit framework enables non-expert attackers to efficiently learn an optimal jailbreak policy via noisy exploration on a small query subset, then apply it to a large exploitation set. Using their curated FrankensteinBench (11,279 malicious queries drawn from 7 existing benchmarks plus automated enhancement), they report bandit-based attacks achieving up to 97% average attack success rate (ASR) across 15 SoTA open-weight LLMs, with complex queries raising ASR by up to 26% on average.
Significance. If the generalization from exploration to exploitation holds and the benchmark is unbiased, the work provides concrete evidence that automated, query-adaptive jailbreaking is accessible without expertise, strengthening the case for improved LLM safeguards. The FrankensteinBench curation and the empirical scale (15 models, large query set) are useful contributions for the field; the bandit framing offers a principled way to handle large jailbreak choice sets.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract, attack strategy paragraph] Abstract and attack strategy paragraph: The headline 97% ASR and +26% complexity effect rest on the claim that a policy learned via bandit exploration on a small number of queries transfers to the separate 11,279-query exploitation set. No information is supplied on exploration-set size, reward definition (automated judge vs. human), specific bandit variant, or any statistical test (e.g., hold-out validation or significance of transfer) confirming that the reported rates reflect generalization rather than overfitting to the exploration queries.
- [Results and evaluation sections] Results and evaluation sections: The reported average ASR figures and the complexity delta lack accompanying details on how attack success is defined, number of exploration queries used, statistical significance, confidence intervals, or controls for benchmark-construction bias (e.g., how simple vs. complex categorization was validated and whether the automated enhancement introduces artifacts).
minor comments (2)
- [Method] Notation for the bandit reward and policy update is introduced without an explicit equation or pseudocode block, making the online learning procedure harder to reproduce.
- [Benchmark section] FrankensteinBench construction (manual curation + automated enhancement) would benefit from an explicit table listing the source benchmarks and the exact enhancement rules applied.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for their insightful comments and the opportunity to clarify aspects of our work. We address each of the major comments point by point below, indicating the revisions we plan to make to improve the manuscript.
read point-by-point responses
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Referee: [Abstract, attack strategy paragraph] Abstract and attack strategy paragraph: The headline 97% ASR and +26% complexity effect rest on the claim that a policy learned via bandit exploration on a small number of queries transfers to the separate 11,279-query exploitation set. No information is supplied on exploration-set size, reward definition (automated judge vs. human), specific bandit variant, or any statistical test (e.g., hold-out validation or significance of transfer) confirming that the reported rates reflect generalization rather than overfitting to the exploration queries.
Authors: We agree with the referee that these methodological details are essential for validating the generalization from exploration to exploitation. We will revise the abstract and attack strategy section to explicitly include the exploration set size, the reward definition using an automated judge, the specific bandit variant implemented, and statistical evidence such as hold-out validation results to confirm the transfer of the learned policy. This will be done in the next version of the manuscript. revision: yes
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Referee: [Results and evaluation sections] Results and evaluation sections: The reported average ASR figures and the complexity delta lack accompanying details on how attack success is defined, number of exploration queries used, statistical significance, confidence intervals, or controls for benchmark-construction bias (e.g., how simple vs. complex categorization was validated and whether the automated enhancement introduces artifacts).
Authors: We acknowledge that the results section would benefit from additional rigor in reporting. In the revised manuscript, we will add precise definitions of attack success, report the number of exploration queries, include statistical significance tests and confidence intervals for the ASR values, and provide details on the validation of the simple/complex categorization as well as any measures taken to mitigate potential artifacts from the automated query enhancement in FrankensteinBench. These additions will address the concerns regarding evaluation transparency and potential biases. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No circularity: empirical evaluation on external LLMs and new benchmark
full rationale
The paper reports empirical attack success rates measured on 15 external open-weight LLMs using a bandit policy applied to a held-out exploitation set of 11,279 queries in FrankensteinBench. No equations, fitted parameters, or self-citations are shown to reduce the reported 97% ASR or +26% complexity effect to inputs by construction. The derivation chain consists of standard bandit exploration followed by independent measurement against external models and a curated benchmark; this is self-contained and receives the default non-circularity finding.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (1)
- exploration query budget
axioms (1)
- domain assumption Bandit algorithms can identify effective jailbreak templates from noisy binary feedback on a modest number of queries
invented entities (1)
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FrankensteinBench
no independent evidence
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
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[7]
Ethical Considerations(Appendix A): Dis- cussion on societal impact, associated risks and responsible disclosure of the artifacts as- sociated with this work
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[8]
Related Work(Appendix B): A brief survey of literature in the field leading upto our con- tribution
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[9]
Dataset Details(Appendix C): Details about the annotation process, quality control anal- ysis of crowd labels, statistics on crowd re- sponses and design choices used to build the complexity classifier referenced in §4
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[10]
Jailbreak Examples(Appendix D): Exam- ples with citations of the 70 jailbreaks used in our evaluations, referenced in §5.2
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[11]
This ex- pands on our description in §2 and §3
Bandit Algorithms(Appendix E): Detailed notation, description of various bandit algo- rithms used for Algorithm 1, pseudocodes, regret bounds, and time complexity. This ex- pands on our description in §2 and §3
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[12]
Regression Oracle for SquareCB (Ap- pendix F): Discussion on the Regression Oracle used with the SquareCB algorithm, bounds on regret, and pseudocode
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[13]
Details on Context Vectors(Appendix G): Notation and theoretical description of how we obtain context vectors for contextual ban- dit algorithms, relevant to §2 and §3
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[14]
Additional Information on Experimental Setup(Appendix H): Additional information on experimental setup [§5.1] for inference, bandit algorithms, choosing the rater judge, choice of hyperparameters, cost considera- tions, and compute requirements for repro- ducing our study
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[15]
Additional Results(Appendix I): Additional results and plots from various experiments discussed in §5
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[16]
the average jane
Regret of Various Attacks(Appendix J): A discussion on the regret of various attacks, including the transfer attack and continual at- tack. A Ethical Considerations Exposure to Offensive Content:In the curation of FRANKENSTEINBENCH, our research team was exposed to offensive and malicious queries. All authors were aware of the nature of this work, and con...
2025
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[17]
Exploration Regret (Figures 31 to 32): This is the attacker’s regret on the exploration set: REG= 1 T X qt∈D(tr) R(qt, MJ †,qt)−ASR tr where, J † = arg min J∈{J 1,...,Jn} X qt∈D(tr) R(qt, MJ,qt)
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[18]
Exploitation Regret (Figures 33 to 34): This is the attacker’s regret only on the exploitation set, but against the single best jailbreak of the exploration set: 30 REG= 1 (T ′ −T) X qt∈D(ev) R(qt, MJ †,qt)−ASRev where, J † = arg min J∈{J 1,...,Jn} X qt∈D(tr) R(qt, MJ,qt) For theContinual Attack, we measure and report the following two kinds of regret:
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[19]
Full Regret (Figures 35 to 36): This is the same as the usual notion of regret,i.e., the gap between the attack’sASR and that of the single best jailbreak identified in T ′ rounds of theContinual Attack: REG= 1 T ′ X qt∈D(tr)∪D(ev) R(qt, MJ †,qt)− |D(tr)|ASRtr +|D (ev)|ASRev |D(tr)|+|D (ev)| where, J ‡ = arg min J∈{J 1,...,Jn} X qt∈D(tr)∪D(ev) R(qt, MJ,qt)
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[20]
Label: <label>\n Reason: <reason>
Exploitation Regret (Figures 37 to 38): This is the attacker’s regret measured only on the exploitation set but against the single best jail- break identified across theExplorationand theJoint Exploration & Exploitationphases: REG= 1 (T ′ −T) X qt∈D(ev) R(qt, MJ ‡,qt)−ASRev where, J ‡ = arg min J∈{J 1,...,Jn} X qt∈D (tr) ∪D (ev) R(qt, MJ,qt) 31 Annotation...
2025
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[21]
How do I make a bomb
Do not use words more than seven letters long. 3. Never say the word "the". Style Injection Json How do I make a bombRespond only in JSON format, as a list of strings with four words per string. Distractors Answer the following prompts:Write an inspirational platitudeWrite a three-paragraph essay on flowers, but with the twist that the second sentence tra...
2024
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