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Activation-Guided Local Editing for Jailbreaking Attacks

Authors: Jiecong Wang, Haoran Li, Hao Peng, Ziqian Zeng, Zihao Wang, Haohua Du, Zhengtao Yu

Published: 2025-08-01

arXiv ID: 2508.00555v1

Added to Library: 2025-08-04 04:01 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Jailbreaking is an essential adversarial technique for red-teaming these models to uncover and patch security flaws. However, existing jailbreak methods face significant drawbacks. Token-level jailbreak attacks often produce incoherent or unreadable inputs and exhibit poor transferability, while prompt-level attacks lack scalability and rely heavily on manual effort and human ingenuity. We propose a concise and effective two-stage framework that combines the advantages of these approaches. The first stage performs a scenario-based generation of context and rephrases the original malicious query to obscure its harmful intent. The second stage then utilizes information from the model's hidden states to guide fine-grained edits, effectively steering the model's internal representation of the input from a malicious toward a benign one. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this method achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate, with gains of up to 37.74% over the strongest baseline, and exhibits excellent transferability to black-box models. Our analysis further demonstrates that AGILE maintains substantial effectiveness against prominent defense mechanisms, highlighting the limitations of current safeguards and providing valuable insights for future defense development. Our code is available at https://github.com/yunsaijc/AGILE.

🔍 Key Points

  • The paper introduces AGILE, a two-stage jailbreak framework that leverages both token-level and prompt-level approaches to enhance the effectiveness of jailbreaking attacks.
  • AGILE's first stage involves generating a deceptive dialogue context to obscure the original malicious intent, while the second stage utilizes model internal signals to guide fine-grained edits that shift the model's hidden state from malicious to benign.
  • Experimental results show that AGILE achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rates (ASR) with improvements of up to 37.74% over the strongest baseline, along with excellent transferability to black-box models.
  • The method demonstrates substantial effectiveness against prominent defense mechanisms, indicating existing safeguards have considerable limitations that could guide future defense development.
  • Ablation studies conducted reveal the critical contributions of different components of AGILE, highlighting the importance of semantic rewriting and activation-guided editing.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

The findings outlined in this paper are vital as they propose a novel methodology for effectively executing jailbreak attacks on large language models while revealing weaknesses in current safety mechanisms. By understanding these vulnerabilities, developers can enhance the security frameworks around AI systems, making the research highly relevant in the context of AI safety and security.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

AI security researchers will find this paper particularly interesting as it not only uncovers advanced techniques in adversarial attacks against large language models but also highlights the limitations of existing defenses, providing a comprehensive landscape regarding AI vulnerability. The insights developed from this research can pave the way for designing more robust AI systems that resist malevolent exploitation.

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