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Abstract
Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs),
such as Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) and COLD-Attack, typically optimize
adversarial suffixes to align the LLM output with a predefined target response.
However, by restricting the optimization objective as inducing a predefined
target, these methods inherently constrain the adversarial search space, which
limit their overall attack efficacy. Furthermore, existing methods typically
require a large number of optimization iterations to fulfill the large gap
between the fixed target and the original model response, resulting in low
attack efficiency.
To overcome the limitations of targeted jailbreak attacks, we propose the
first gradient-based untargeted jailbreak attack (UJA), aiming to elicit an
unsafe response without enforcing any predefined patterns. Specifically, we
formulate an untargeted attack objective to maximize the unsafety probability
of the LLM response, which can be quantified using a judge model. Since the
objective is non-differentiable, we further decompose it into two
differentiable sub-objectives for optimizing an optimal harmful response and
the corresponding adversarial prompt, with a theoretical analysis to validate
the decomposition. In contrast to targeted jailbreak attacks, UJA's
unrestricted objective significantly expands the search space, enabling a more
flexible and efficient exploration of LLM vulnerabilities.Extensive evaluations
demonstrate that UJA can achieve over 80% attack success rates against recent
safety-aligned LLMs with only 100 optimization iterations, outperforming the
state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks such as I-GCG and COLD-Attack by over
20%.