Beyond the Tip of Efficiency: Uncovering the Submerged Threats of Jailbreak Attacks in Small Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Small language models (SLMs) have become increasingly prominent in the deployment on edge devices due to their high efficiency and low computational cost. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the security performance of 13 state-of-the-art small language models under various jailbreak attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods demonstrate that SLMs are quite susceptible to jailbreak attacks and some are even vulnerable to harmful prompts. |
Similar Papers
A Comprehensive Study of Jailbreak Attack versus Defense for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities for generating content that could be deemed harmful. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of existing studies on jailbreaking LLMs and their defense techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques underperform existing white-box attacks and include special tokens significantly affects the likelihood of successful attacks. |
SPIRIT: Patching Speech Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Speech language models (SLMs) enable natural interactions via spoken instructions, which more effectively capture user intent by detecting nuances in speech. |
| Approach: | They propose post-hoc patching defenses to intervene during inference by modifying the SLM’s activations that improve robustness up to 99% with negligible impact on utility and without any re-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defenses improve robustness up to 99% with negligible impact on utility and (ii) without any re-training. |
Shaping the Safety Boundaries: Understanding and Defending Against Jailbreaks in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Understanding how jailbreaking works remains limited, hindering the development of effective defense strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a new mechanism that adaptively constrains activations within the safety boundary and propose 'Activation Boundary Defense' to enhance its effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense achieves an average Defense Success Rate (DSR) of over 98% against various jailbreak attacks, with less than 2% impact on the model’s general capabilities. |
Revisiting Jailbreaking for Large Language Models: A Representation Engineering Perspective (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Tianlong Li, Zhenghua Wang, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Shihan Dou, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) however, limited research into the underlying mechanisms that make LLMs vulnerable to such attacks has been conducted. |
| Approach: | They propose that LLMs' self-safeguarding capability is linked to specific activity patterns within their representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be detected with a few pairs of contrastive queries, and the robustness can be manipulated by weakening or strengthening these patterns. |
From Attack Surfaces to Actual Operations: A Survey of Modern LLM Jailbreaks (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing taxonomies focus on manipulation methods rather than underlying mechanisms, limiting our understanding of attack effectiveness and defensive strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-fold taxonomy to categorize attacks across three tiers based on exploited vulnerabilities and approaches and an operational taxonomies to evaluate attacks across four dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes attacks across three tiers based on exploited vulnerabilities and approaches and evaluates attacks on four dimensions to assess real-world feasibility and sustainability. |
SpeechGuard: Exploring the Adversarial Robustness of Multi-modal Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Raghuveer Peri, Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Srikanth Ronanki, Anshu Bhatia, Karel Mundnich, Saket Dingliwal, Nilaksh Das, Zejiang Hou, Goeric Huybrechts, Srikanth Vishnubhotla, Daniel Garcia-Romero, Sundararajan Srinivasan, Kyu Han, Katrin Kirchhoff
| Challenge: | Integrated Speech and Large Language Models (SLMs) that follow speech instructions and generate relevant text responses have gained popularity lately. |
| Approach: | They propose algorithms that can generate adversarial examples to jailbreak SLMs without human involvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms achieve state-of-the-art on spoken question-answering task scoring over 80% on both safety and helpfulness metrics. |
LLMs Caught in the Crossfire: Malware Requests and Jailbreak Challenges (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have a high vulnerability to jailbreak attacks that leverage crafted prompts to generate malicious outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to test their security against jailbreak attacks that leverage crafted prompts to generate malicious outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 320 manually crafted malicious code generation requirements, covering 11 jailbreak methods and 29 code functionality categories. |
From LLMs to MLLMs: Exploring the Landscape of Multimodal Jailbreaking (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, effectively following instructions to meet diverse user needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluation benchmarks and attack techniques for LLMs and MLLMs to enhance their security. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks have been exploited to exploit the weaknesses of LLMs and MLLMs. |
Tricking LLMs into Disobedience: Formalizing, Analyzing, and Detecting Jailbreaks (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to jailbreak large language models have been poorly studied . a recent study showed that non-expert users can jailbreak LLMs by manipulating their prompts . |
| Approach: | They propose a formalism and a taxonomy of known (and possible) jailbreaks . they propose generating a dataset of model outputs across 3700 jailbreak prompts a 'prompt' attack is a new attack popularly categorized as "prompting injection attacks" |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exploits 3700 jailbreak prompts over 4 tasks to analyze their effectiveness . authors show that the model can learn to perform a new task on unseen examples . |
Towards Understanding Jailbreak Attacks in LLMs: A Representation Space Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage hidden representations into existing jailbreak targets to move the attacks along the acceptance direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are validated using the objective of existing jailbreak attacks. |