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COLD-Attack: Jailbreaking LLMs with Stealthiness and Controllability

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arxiv 2402.08679 v2 pith:LRTMBMDM submitted 2024-02-13 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.CL
keywords cold-attackcontrollableattackattacksconstraintcontrollabilitygenerationllms
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Jailbreaks on large language models (LLMs) have recently received increasing attention. For a comprehensive assessment of LLM safety, it is essential to consider jailbreaks with diverse attributes, such as contextual coherence and sentiment/stylistic variations, and hence it is beneficial to study controllable jailbreaking, i.e. how to enforce control on LLM attacks. In this paper, we formally formulate the controllable attack generation problem, and build a novel connection between this problem and controllable text generation, a well-explored topic of natural language processing. Based on this connection, we adapt the Energy-based Constrained Decoding with Langevin Dynamics (COLD), a state-of-the-art, highly efficient algorithm in controllable text generation, and introduce the COLD-Attack framework which unifies and automates the search of adversarial LLM attacks under a variety of control requirements such as fluency, stealthiness, sentiment, and left-right-coherence. The controllability enabled by COLD-Attack leads to diverse new jailbreak scenarios which not only cover the standard setting of generating fluent (suffix) attack with continuation constraint, but also allow us to address new controllable attack settings such as revising a user query adversarially with paraphrasing constraint, and inserting stealthy attacks in context with position constraint. Our extensive experiments on various LLMs (Llama-2, Mistral, Vicuna, Guanaco, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) show COLD-Attack's broad applicability, strong controllability, high success rate, and attack transferability. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/COLD-Attack.

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Cited by 17 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. One Modality to Forget Them All: Enhancing Cross-Modal Unlearning in Vision-Language Models

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5 of 10

    Cross-modal unlearning transfer in vision-language models is asymmetric, architecture-dependent, and shallow under typographic attacks; influence-guided block selection reduces the measured gap.

  2. One Anchor for All: Unified Multilingual and Multimodal Safety Alignment for LVLMs

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A small set of model neurons shared across languages and modalities can transfer English-only safety training to multilingual and multimodal refusal behavior.

  3. Weak-to-Strong On-Policy Distillation

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A strong LLM is improved by distilling from the logit difference of two weaker models instead of from a stronger teacher.

  4. Targeted Interpretable Safety Neuron Enhancement for Multilingual Vision-Language Large Models

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Precise Shield identifies safety neurons in VLLMs via activation contrasts and aligns only them with gradient masking, boosting safety, preserving generalization, and enabling zero-shot cross-lingual and cross-modal transfer.

  5. Are LLMs Reliable Rankers? Rank Manipulation via Two-Stage Token Optimization

    cs.CL 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    RAF, a two-stage token-optimization attack, creates brief natural-sounding text injections that reliably boost a target item's rank in LLM reranking outputs, beating state-of-the-art baselines in effectiveness, stealt...

  6. Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

    cs.CR 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Coding agents jailbroken with simple prompts produced executable malicious code in 27–32% of attempts, and single/multi-file scaffolds drove compliance to roughly 100% for frontier models.

  7. JADES: A Universal Framework for Jailbreak Assessment via Decompositional Scoring

    cs.CR 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    JADES judges jailbreak success by decomposing harmful prompts into weighted sub-questions and scoring each part, claiming 98.5% human agreement and showing prior attack success rates are inflated.

  8. Adaptive Content Restriction for Large Language Models via Suffix Optimization

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SOP appends an optimized suffix to prompts, reducing generation of user-specified restricted terms across several LLMs while keeping output quality close to baseline prompting methods.

  9. Circumventing Safety Alignment in Large Language Models Through Embedding Space Toxicity Attenuation

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    ETTA bypasses LLM safety refusals by learning a linear toxicity direction in the embedding space and attenuating it in word embeddings at inference time.

  10. A Red Teaming Framework for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Faithfulness Evaluation

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    Introduces a multi-role red teaming framework using attacker and jury models that increases attack success rates by up to 7.9% on LLM faithfulness in question-answering tasks.

  11. MoGU V2: Toward a Higher Pareto Frontier Between Model Usability and Security

    cs.CL 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    MoGUv2 embeds small routers in the deeper layers of LLMs to dynamically blend a helpful variant and a refusal variant, improving safety against jailbreak and fine-tuning attacks while preserving usability.

  12. Anchoring Refusal Direction: Mitigating Safety Risks in Tuning via Projection Constraint

    cs.CL 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    ProCon anchors each sample's hidden-state projection onto the LLM's initial refusal direction during instruction fine-tuning, reducing refusal-direction drift and safety risks with limited task-performance loss.

  13. Layer-Wise Perturbations via Sparse Autoencoders for Adversarial Text Generation

    cs.CL 2025-08 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    Sparse autoencoder activation perturbation (SFPF) applied on top of existing jailbreak prompts raises attack success rate on Qwen3-32B, but with no defense evaluation and weak reproducibility.

  14. A Systematic Survey of Model Extraction Attacks and Defenses: State-of-the-Art and Perspectives

    cs.CR 2025-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper classifies model extraction attacks and defenses into attack, defense, and computing environment categories and surveys their current state.

  15. A Representation Engineering Perspective on the Effectiveness of Multi-Turn Jailbreaks

    cs.CR 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Crescendo multi-turn jailbreak responses are represented by safety-tuned LLMs as benign rather than harmful, which helps explain why single-turn defenses fail.

  16. Align is not Enough: Multimodal Universal Jailbreak Attack against Multimodal Large Language Models

    cs.CR 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    An alternating image-text optimization produces a universal adversarial suffix and image that transfer across open multimodal LLMs more effectively than single-modality jailbreaks.

  17. Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    APL iteratively trains an attacker to generate adversarial prompt rewrites and a defender to resist them, using the defender's own preference probabilities as the attack signal.

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