Pith. sign in

REVIEW 7 cited by

Intention Analysis Makes LLMs A Good Jailbreak Defender

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2401.06561 v4 pith:WNEJS26R submitted 2024-01-12 cs.CL

Intention Analysis Makes LLMs A Good Jailbreak Defender

classification cs.CL
keywords mathbbjailbreakllmsintentionanalysisattackcomplexrate
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, particularly when facing complex and stealthy jailbreak attacks, presents a formidable challenge. Unfortunately, existing methods often overlook this intrinsic nature of jailbreaks, which limits their effectiveness in such complex scenarios. In this study, we present a simple yet highly effective defense strategy, i.e., Intention Analysis ($\mathbb{IA}$). $\mathbb{IA}$ works by triggering LLMs' inherent self-correct and improve ability through a two-stage process: 1) analyzing the essential intention of the user input, and 2) providing final policy-aligned responses based on the first round conversation. Notably, $\mathbb{IA}$ is an inference-only method, thus could enhance LLM safety without compromising their helpfulness. Extensive experiments on varying jailbreak benchmarks across a wide range of LLMs show that $\mathbb{IA}$ could consistently and significantly reduce the harmfulness in responses (averagely -48.2% attack success rate). Encouragingly, with our $\mathbb{IA}$, Vicuna-7B even outperforms GPT-3.5 regarding attack success rate. We empirically demonstrate that, to some extent, $\mathbb{IA}$ is robust to errors in generated intentions. Further analyses reveal the underlying principle of $\mathbb{IA}$: suppressing LLM's tendency to follow jailbreak prompts, thereby enhancing safety.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Ellipsoid Control: A White-list Jailbreak Defense via Benign Latent Modeling

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Ellipsoid Control is a white-list test-time jailbreak defense that fits an anisotropic ellipsoid from benign activations to constrain projected gradient descent updates, aiming to improve the safety-utility tradeoff o...

  2. TwinGate: Stateful Defense against Decompositional Jailbreaks in Untraceable Traffic via Asymmetric Contrastive Learning

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    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.

  3. Reasoning Structure Matters for Safety Alignment of Reasoning Models

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    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.

  4. ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments

    cs.CL 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ReasoningGuard is an inference-time method that uses attention mechanisms to inject safety aha moments and scaling sampling to defend large reasoning models against jailbreak attacks.

  5. Grounded Scaling: Why Agentic AI Needs Deterministic Environments

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Agentic AI scaling requires deterministic environments because per-step success probability below 1 causes exponential degradation in k-step chains, addressed via new metrics SCI and DMM plus formal bounds.

  6. Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey

    cs.CR 2024-07 accept novelty 4.0

    A survey that creates taxonomies for jailbreak attacks and defenses on LLMs, subdivides them into sub-classes, and compares evaluation approaches.

  7. Beyond Context: Large Language Models' Failure to Grasp Users' Intent

    cs.AI 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    LLMs fail to detect hidden harmful intent, allowing systematic bypass of safety mechanisms through framing techniques, with reasoning modes often worsening the issue.