Mingjie Li

Accurately determining whether a jailbreak attempt has succeeded is a fundamental yet unresolved challenge. Existing evaluation methods rely on misaligned proxy indicators or naive holistic judgments. They frequently misinterpret model responses, leading to inconsistent and subjective assessments that misalign with human perception. To address this gap, we introduce JADES (Jailbreak Assessment via Decompositional Scoring), a universal jailbreak evaluation framework. Its key mechanism is to automatically decompose an input harmful question into a set of weighted sub-questions, score each sub-answer, and weight-aggregate the sub-scores into a final decision. JADES also incorporates an optional fact-checking module to strengthen the detection of hallucinations in jailbreak responses. We validate JADES on JailbreakQR, a newly introduced benchmark proposed in this work, consisting of 400 pairs of jailbreak prompts and responses, each meticulously annotated by humans. In a binary setting (success/failure), JADES achieves 98.5% agreement with human evaluators, outperforming strong baselines by over 9%. Re-evaluating five popular attacks on four LLMs reveals substantial overestimation (e.g., LAA's attack success rate on GPT-3.5-Turbo drops from 93% to 69%). Our results show that JADES could deliver accurate, consistent, and interpretable evaluations, providing a reliable basis for measuring future jailbreak attacks.

Machine learning models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, but even aligned models such as Mistral and LLaVA still exhibit unsafe behaviors inherited from pre-training. Current alignment methods like SFT and RLHF primarily encourage models to generate preferred responses, but do not explicitly remove the unsafe subnetworks that trigger harmful outputs. In this work, we introduce a resource-efficient pruning framework that directly identifies and removes parameters associated with unsafe behaviors while preserving model utility. Our method employs a gradient-free attribution mechanism, requiring only modest GPU resources, and generalizes across architectures and quantized variants. Empirical evaluations on ML models show substantial reductions in unsafe generations and improved robustness against jailbreak attacks, with minimal utility loss. From the perspective of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, our results suggest that ML models contain "unsafe tickets" responsible for harmful behaviors, and pruning reveals "safety tickets" that maintain performance while aligning outputs. This provides a lightweight, post-hoc alignment strategy suitable for deployment in resource-constrained settings.