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Understanding Jailbreak Success: A Study of Latent Space Dynamics in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2406.09289 v2 pith:2L6D4PUT submitted 2024-06-13 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

Understanding Jailbreak Success: A Study of Latent Space Dynamics in Large Language Models

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG
keywords jailbreakdifferentjailbreakslanguagemodelmodelsdynamicseffective
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Conversational large language models are trained to refuse to answer harmful questions. However, emergent jailbreaking techniques can still elicit unsafe outputs, presenting an ongoing challenge for model alignment. To better understand how different jailbreak types circumvent safeguards, this paper analyses model activations on different jailbreak inputs. We find that it is possible to extract a jailbreak vector from a single class of jailbreaks that works to mitigate jailbreak effectiveness from other semantically-dissimilar classes. This may indicate that different kinds of effective jailbreaks operate via a similar internal mechanism. We investigate a potential common mechanism of harmfulness feature suppression, and find evidence that effective jailbreaks noticeably reduce a model's perception of prompt harmfulness. These findings offer actionable insights for developing more robust jailbreak countermeasures and lay the groundwork for a deeper, mechanistic understanding of jailbreak dynamics in language models.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

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  2. Why Do Large Language Models Generate Harmful Content?

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    Causal mediation analysis shows harmful LLM outputs arise in late layers from MLP failures and gating neurons, with early layers handling harm context detection and signal propagation.

  3. Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    The survey organizes mechanistic interpretability techniques into a Locate-Steer-Improve framework to enable actionable improvements in LLM alignment, capability, and efficiency.