Litian Zhang

This paper provides a systematic survey of jailbreak attacks and defenses on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), emphasizing that jailbreak vulnerabilities stem from structural factors such as incomplete training data, linguistic ambiguity, and generative uncertainty. It further differentiates between hallucinations and jailbreaks in terms of intent and triggering mechanisms. We propose a three-dimensional survey framework: (1) Attack dimension-including template/encoding-based, in-context learning manipulation, reinforcement/adversarial learning, LLM-assisted and fine-tuned attacks, as well as prompt- and image-level perturbations and agent-based transfer in VLMs; (2) Defense dimension-encompassing prompt-level obfuscation, output evaluation, and model-level alignment or fine-tuning; and (3) Evaluation dimension-covering metrics such as Attack Success Rate (ASR), toxicity score, query/time cost, and multimodal Clean Accuracy and Attribute Success Rate. Compared with prior works, this survey spans the full spectrum from text-only to multimodal settings, consolidating shared mechanisms and proposing unified defense principles: variant-consistency and gradient-sensitivity detection at the perception layer, safety-aware decoding and output review at the generation layer, and adversarially augmented preference alignment at the parameter layer. Additionally, we summarize existing multimodal safety benchmarks and discuss future directions, including automated red teaming, cross-modal collaborative defense, and standardized evaluation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as the backbone of modern AI systems, yet they remain susceptible to adversarial jailbreak attacks. Consequently, robust detection of such malicious inputs is paramount for ensuring model safety. Traditional detection methods typically rely on external models trained on fixed, large-scale datasets, which often incur significant computational overhead. While recent methods shift toward leveraging internal safety signals of models to enable more lightweight and efficient detection. However, these methods remain inherently static and struggle to adapt to the evolving nature of jailbreak attacks. Drawing inspiration from the biological immune mechanism, we introduce the Immune Memory Adaptive Guard (IMAG) framework. By distilling and encoding safety patterns into a persistent, evolvable memory bank, IMAG enables adaptive generalization to emerging threats. Specifically, the framework orchestrates three synergistic components: Immune Detection, which employs retrieval for high-efficiency interception of known jailbreak attacks; Active Immunity, which performs proactive behavioral simulation to resolve ambiguous unknown queries; Memory Updating, which integrates validated attack patterns back into the memory bank. This closed-loop architecture transitions LLM defense from rigid filtering to autonomous adaptive mitigation. Extensive evaluations across five representative open-source LLMs demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, achieving a superior average detection accuracy of 94\% across diverse and complex attack types.

Jailbreak attacks present a significant challenge to the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet current automated evaluation methods largely rely on coarse classifications that focus mainly on harmfulness, leading to substantial overestimation of attack success. To address this problem, we propose FJAR, a fine-grained jailbreak evaluation framework with anchored references. We first categorized jailbreak responses into five fine-grained categories: Rejective, Irrelevant, Unhelpful, Incorrect, and Successful, based on the degree to which the response addresses the malicious intent of the query. This categorization serves as the basis for FJAR. Then, we introduce a novel harmless tree decomposition approach to construct high-quality anchored references by breaking down the original queries. These references guide the evaluator in determining whether the response genuinely fulfills the original query. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FJAR achieves the highest alignment with human judgment and effectively identifies the root causes of jailbreak failures, providing actionable guidance for improving attack strategies.