Harmful skills in open agent ecosystems raise average harm scores from 0.27 to 0.76 across six LLMs by lowering refusal rates when tasks are presented via pre-installed skills.
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A StrongREJECT for Empty Jailbreaks
Baseline reference. 50% of citing Pith papers use this work as a benchmark or comparison.
abstract
Most jailbreak papers claim the jailbreaks they propose are highly effective, often boasting near-100% attack success rates. However, it is perhaps more common than not for jailbreak developers to substantially exaggerate the effectiveness of their jailbreaks. We suggest this problem arises because jailbreak researchers lack a standard, high-quality benchmark for evaluating jailbreak performance, leaving researchers to create their own. To create a benchmark, researchers must choose a dataset of forbidden prompts to which a victim model will respond, along with an evaluation method that scores the harmfulness of the victim model's responses. We show that existing benchmarks suffer from significant shortcomings and introduce the StrongREJECT benchmark to address these issues. StrongREJECT's dataset contains prompts that victim models must answer with specific, harmful information, while its automated evaluator measures the extent to which a response gives useful information to forbidden prompts. In doing so, the StrongREJECT evaluator achieves state-of-the-art agreement with human judgments of jailbreak effectiveness. Notably, we find that existing evaluation methods significantly overstate jailbreak effectiveness compared to human judgments and the StrongREJECT evaluator. We describe a surprising and novel phenomenon that explains this discrepancy: jailbreaks bypassing a victim model's safety fine-tuning tend to reduce its capabilities. Together, our findings underscore the need for researchers to use a high-quality benchmark, such as StrongREJECT, when developing new jailbreak attacks. We release the StrongREJECT code and data at https://strong-reject.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
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representative citing papers
Boiling the Frog is a new stateful multi-turn benchmark that finds an aggregate 44.4% strict attack success rate for incremental safety violations across nine AI models, with rates ranging from 20.5% to 92.9%.
ContextualJailbreak uses evolutionary search over simulated primed dialogues with novel mutations to reach 90-100% attack success on open LLMs and transfers to some closed frontier models at 15-90% rates.
Jailbreak-induced performance loss shrinks as model capability grows, with the strongest models showing almost no degradation on benchmarks.
STAR-Teaming uses a Strategy-Response Multiplex Network inside a multi-agent framework to organize attack strategies into semantic communities, delivering higher attack success rates on LLMs at lower computational cost than prior methods.
Refusal in language models is mediated by a single direction in residual stream activations that can be erased to disable safety or added to elicit refusal.
DG-Hard uses Donoho-Gavish hard thresholding on the fine-tuning weight delta to separate task-aligned signal from noise-like residual, recovering damaged capabilities while preserving target-task gains.
Toxicity benchmarks for LLMs produce inconsistent results when task type, input domain, or model changes, revealing intrinsic evaluation biases.
TwinGate deploys a stateful dual-encoder system with asymmetric contrastive learning to detect decompositional jailbreaks in untraceable LLM traffic at high recall and low false-positive rate with negligible latency.
Changing the internal reasoning structure of large reasoning models through simple supervised fine-tuning on 1K examples produces strong safety alignment that generalizes across tasks and languages.
Different LLM jailbreak techniques achieve similar harmful compliance but lead to distinct behavioral side effects and mechanistic changes.
Steering vectors for refusal primarily modify the OV circuit in attention, ignore most of the QK circuit, and can be sparsified to 1-10% of dimensions while retaining performance.
Swiss-Bench 003 extends an existing Swiss LLM assessment with two new dimensions and evaluates ten models on 808 items, finding high self-graded reliability scores but low adversarial security scores.
Introduces secondary risks as a new class of LLM failures from benign prompts, defines two primitives, proposes SecLens search framework, and releases SecRiskBench showing risks are widespread across 16 models.
Develops the BSD data generation pipeline and two new datasets to evaluate decomposition attacks as effective misuse enablers and stateful defenses as a countermeasure in language model safety.
Disentangled Safety Adapters decouple safety computations from task-optimized LLMs via lightweight adapters, yielding up to 53% better AUC on safety tasks and dynamic inference-time alignment with reduced performance trade-offs.
JailbreakBench supplies an evolving set of jailbreak prompts, a 100-behavior dataset aligned with usage policies, a standardized evaluation framework, and a leaderboard to enable comparable assessments of attacks and defenses on LLMs.
The paper releases a 1,554-prompt consensus-labeled bank separating executable malicious code requests from security knowledge requests, validated by five-model majority labeling with Fleiss' kappa of 0.876.
Guardian-as-an-Advisor prepends risk labels and explanations from a guardian model to queries, improving LLM safety compliance and reducing over-refusal while adding minimal compute overhead.
Mixed-methods study of 53 survey respondents and 16 interviewees reveals LLM refusals in mental health contexts as dynamic multi-phase experiences and proposes a framework for evaluation beyond binary compliance.
OpenAI releases two open-weight reasoning models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, trained via distillation and RL with claimed strong results on math, coding, and safety benchmarks.
OpenAI reports that chain-of-thought reasoning in o1 models enables deliberative alignment, yielding state-of-the-art results on selected safety benchmarks for illicit advice, stereotypes, and jailbreaks.
A survey that creates taxonomies for jailbreak attacks and defenses on LLMs, subdivides them into sub-classes, and compares evaluation approaches.
GPT-5 is a unified model system that routes queries between fast and deep reasoning paths and reports gains in real-world usefulness, reduced hallucinations, and safety features over prior versions.
citing papers explorer
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HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?
Harmful skills in open agent ecosystems raise average harm scores from 0.27 to 0.76 across six LLMs by lowering refusal rates when tasks are presented via pre-installed skills.
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Boiling the Frog: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Agentic Safety
Boiling the Frog is a new stateful multi-turn benchmark that finds an aggregate 44.4% strict attack success rate for incremental safety violations across nine AI models, with rates ranging from 20.5% to 92.9%.
-
ContextualJailbreak: Evolutionary Red-Teaming via Simulated Conversational Priming
ContextualJailbreak uses evolutionary search over simulated primed dialogues with novel mutations to reach 90-100% attack success on open LLMs and transfers to some closed frontier models at 15-90% rates.
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Jailbroken Frontier Models Retain Their Capabilities
Jailbreak-induced performance loss shrinks as model capability grows, with the strongest models showing almost no degradation on benchmarks.
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STAR-Teaming: A Strategy-Response Multiplex Network Approach to Automated LLM Red Teaming
STAR-Teaming uses a Strategy-Response Multiplex Network inside a multi-agent framework to organize attack strategies into semantic communities, delivering higher attack success rates on LLMs at lower computational cost than prior methods.
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Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction
Refusal in language models is mediated by a single direction in residual stream activations that can be erased to disable safety or added to elicit refusal.
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Spectral Unforgetting: Post-Hoc Recovery of Damaged Capabilities Without Retraining
DG-Hard uses Donoho-Gavish hard thresholding on the fine-tuning weight delta to separate task-aligned signal from noise-like residual, recovering damaged capabilities while preserving target-task gains.
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Navigating the Sea of LLM Evaluation: Investigating Bias in Toxicity Benchmarks
Toxicity benchmarks for LLMs produce inconsistent results when task type, input domain, or model changes, revealing intrinsic evaluation biases.
-
TwinGate: Stateful Defense against Decompositional Jailbreaks in Untraceable Traffic via Asymmetric Contrastive Learning
TwinGate deploys a stateful dual-encoder system with asymmetric contrastive learning to detect decompositional jailbreaks in untraceable LLM traffic at high recall and low false-positive rate with negligible latency.
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Reasoning Structure Matters for Safety Alignment of Reasoning Models
Changing the internal reasoning structure of large reasoning models through simple supervised fine-tuning on 1K examples produces strong safety alignment that generalizes across tasks and languages.
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Different Paths to Harmful Compliance: Behavioral Side Effects and Mechanistic Divergence Across LLM Jailbreaks
Different LLM jailbreak techniques achieve similar harmful compliance but lead to distinct behavioral side effects and mechanistic changes.
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What Drives Representation Steering? A Mechanistic Case Study on Steering Refusal
Steering vectors for refusal primarily modify the OV circuit in attention, ignore most of the QK circuit, and can be sparsified to 1-10% of dimensions while retaining performance.
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Swiss-Bench 003: Evaluating LLM Reliability and Adversarial Security for Swiss Regulatory Contexts
Swiss-Bench 003 extends an existing Swiss LLM assessment with two new dimensions and evaluates ten models on 808 items, finding high self-graded reliability scores but low adversarial security scores.
-
Exploring the Secondary Risks of Large Language Models
Introduces secondary risks as a new class of LLM failures from benign prompts, defines two primitives, proposes SecLens search framework, and releases SecRiskBench showing risks are widespread across 16 models.
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Benchmarking Misuse Mitigation Against Covert Adversaries
Develops the BSD data generation pipeline and two new datasets to evaluate decomposition attacks as effective misuse enablers and stateful defenses as a countermeasure in language model safety.
-
Disentangled Safety Adapters Enable Efficient Guardrails and Flexible Inference-Time Alignment
Disentangled Safety Adapters decouple safety computations from task-optimized LLMs via lightweight adapters, yielding up to 53% better AUC on safety tasks and dynamic inference-time alignment with reduced performance trade-offs.
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JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
JailbreakBench supplies an evolving set of jailbreak prompts, a 100-behavior dataset aligned with usage policies, a standardized evaluation framework, and a leaderboard to enable comparable assessments of attacks and defenses on LLMs.
-
A Validated Prompt Bank for Malicious Code Generation: Separating Executable Weapons from Security Knowledge in 1,554 Consensus-Labeled Prompts
The paper releases a 1,554-prompt consensus-labeled bank separating executable malicious code requests from security knowledge requests, validated by five-model majority labeling with Fleiss' kappa of 0.876.
-
Guardian-as-an-Advisor: Advancing Next-Generation Guardian Models for Trustworthy LLMs
Guardian-as-an-Advisor prepends risk labels and explanations from a guardian model to queries, improving LLM safety compliance and reducing over-refusal while adding minimal compute overhead.
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Beyond the Single Turn: Reframing Refusals as Dynamic Experiences Embedded in the Context of Mental Health Support Interactions with LLMs
Mixed-methods study of 53 survey respondents and 16 interviewees reveals LLM refusals in mental health contexts as dynamic multi-phase experiences and proposes a framework for evaluation beyond binary compliance.
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gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card
OpenAI releases two open-weight reasoning models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, trained via distillation and RL with claimed strong results on math, coding, and safety benchmarks.
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OpenAI o1 System Card
OpenAI reports that chain-of-thought reasoning in o1 models enables deliberative alignment, yielding state-of-the-art results on selected safety benchmarks for illicit advice, stereotypes, and jailbreaks.
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Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey
A survey that creates taxonomies for jailbreak attacks and defenses on LLMs, subdivides them into sub-classes, and compares evaluation approaches.
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OpenAI GPT-5 System Card
GPT-5 is a unified model system that routes queries between fast and deep reasoning paths and reports gains in real-world usefulness, reduced hallucinations, and safety features over prior versions.
- Benchmarking and Improving Monitors for Out-Of-Distribution Alignment Failure in LLMs