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Forewarned is Forearmed: Pre-Synthesizing Jailbreak-like Instructions to Enhance LLM Safety Guardrail to Potential Attacks

Authors: Sheng Liu, Qiang Sheng, Danding Wang, Yang Li, Guang Yang, Juan Cao

Published: 2025-08-27

arXiv ID: 2508.20038v1

Added to Library: 2025-08-28 04:00 UTC

Red Teaming Safety

📄 Abstract

Despite advances in improving large language model(LLM) to refuse to answer malicious instructions, widely used LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks where attackers generate instructions with distributions differing from safety alignment corpora. New attacks expose LLMs' inability to recognize unseen malicious instructions, highlighting a critical distributional mismatch between training data and real-world attacks that forces developers into reactive patching cycles. To tackle this challenge, we propose IMAGINE, a synthesis framework that leverages embedding space distribution analysis to generate jailbreak-like instructions. This approach effectively fills the distributional gap between authentic jailbreak patterns and safety alignment corpora. IMAGINE follows an iterative optimization process that dynamically evolves text generation distributions across iterations, thereby augmenting the coverage of safety alignment data distributions through synthesized data examples. Based on the safety-aligned corpus enhanced through IMAGINE, our framework demonstrates significant decreases in attack success rate on Qwen2.5, Llama3.1, and Llama3.2 without compromising their utility.

🔍 Key Points

  • Development of IMAGINE: An iterative framework for synthesizing jailbreak-like instructions to enhance LLM safety.
  • Proactive approach to address distributional mismatch between training datasets and real-world attacks, contrasting reactive patching cycles.
  • Demonstrated significant effectiveness of IMAGINE in reducing attack success rates on models (up to 90%) without compromising utility.
  • In-depth experimental validation with ablation studies that highlight the importance of each methodological stage and loss functions used in the framework.
  • Real-world application of synthesizing adversarial examples to robustly strengthen model safety alignments.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper presents a crucial advancement in LLM safety mechanisms by introducing a novel framework that not only addresses vulnerabilities through proactive data generation but also enhances overall safety alignments. By filling the gap between traditional training datasets and real-world malicious instructions, this work significantly improves LLM robustness against potential misuse, making it an essential read for researchers and developers working in AI safety and security domains.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

The findings and methodologies introduced in this paper are particularly relevant for AI security researchers as they propose a new paradigm for anticipating and mitigating security vulnerabilities in language models. The novel methods for generating synthetic adversarial examples allow for improved safety training, thereby contributing to the development of more resilient AI systems against increasingly sophisticated attacks. As the landscape of AI is rapidly evolving, such proactive measures are critical for ensuring the safe deployment of powerful models.

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