Jailbreaks as Inference-Time Alignment: A Framework for Understanding Safety Failures in LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are safety-aligned to prevent harmful response generation . prior work on jailbreak effectiveness has focused on analyzing success rate of jailbreaks . |
| Approach: | They propose to frame jailbreaks as inference-time alignment and draw suboptimal bounds . they also propose a Safety-Net to measure how vulnerable an LLM is to jailbreak attacks . |
| Outcome: | a new framework allows researchers to show how vulnerable an LLM is to jailbreaks . a Safety-Net measures how vulnerable the model is to attacks, the authors say . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid malicious user inputs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the models, neglecting the full deployment pipeline . previous studies have underestimated the practical success of these attacks . |
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Shaping the Safety Boundaries: Understanding and Defending Against Jailbreaks in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Understanding how jailbreaking works remains limited, hindering the development of effective defense strategies. |
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CAVGAN: Unifying Jailbreak and Defense of LLMs via Generative Adversarial Attacks on their Internal Representations (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have isolated LLM jailbreak attacks and defenses . a new framework combines attack and defense to protect against malicious queries . |
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Chung-En Sun, Xiaodong Liu, Weiwei Yang, Tsui-Wei Weng, Hao Cheng, Aidan San, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated jailbreak attacks. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have inherent risk of generating harmful and unsafe content. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements but can be misused to generate harmful content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Robustly Aligned LLM to defend against alignment-breaking attacks by retraining existing LLMs and using adversarial or handcrafted jailbreaking prompts. |
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Beyond Surface Alignment: Rebuilding LLMs Safety Mechanism via Probabilistically Ablating Refusal Direction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models . current safety alignment methods have insufficient safety alignment depth and unrobust internal defense mechanisms. |
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