@inproceedings{yu-etal-2025-llmfixer,
title = "{L}lm{F}ixer: Fix the Helpfulness of Defensive Large Language Models",
author = "Yu, Zelong and
Zhang, Xiaoming and
Zhang, Litian and
Yuan, Yu and
Li, Chaozhuo",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.989/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.989",
pages = "18233--18247",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
abstract = "Defense strategies of large language models besides alignment are introduced to defend against jailbreak attacks, and they have managed to decrease the success rate of jailbreak attacks. However, these defense strategies weakened the helpfulness of large language models. In this work, we propose a universal framework, LlmFixer, acting on large language models equipped with any defense strategy to recover their original helpfulness. LlmFixer consists of an input prompt re-writer and a logic patch. The prompt re-writer is a pre-model for clarifying the intention of input prompts, which promotes large language models to be more helpful to benign inputs and more rejective to malicious inputs. The logic patch is a lightweight structure that enhances large language models' comprehension capacity by supplementing certain logical relationships. Without updating the parameters of a defensive large language model, LlmFixer fixes its helpfulness while preserving safety. Experiments on three large language models, five jailbreak attacks, and four defense strategies show the effectiveness of LlmFixer."
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<abstract>Defense strategies of large language models besides alignment are introduced to defend against jailbreak attacks, and they have managed to decrease the success rate of jailbreak attacks. However, these defense strategies weakened the helpfulness of large language models. In this work, we propose a universal framework, LlmFixer, acting on large language models equipped with any defense strategy to recover their original helpfulness. LlmFixer consists of an input prompt re-writer and a logic patch. The prompt re-writer is a pre-model for clarifying the intention of input prompts, which promotes large language models to be more helpful to benign inputs and more rejective to malicious inputs. The logic patch is a lightweight structure that enhances large language models’ comprehension capacity by supplementing certain logical relationships. Without updating the parameters of a defensive large language model, LlmFixer fixes its helpfulness while preserving safety. Experiments on three large language models, five jailbreak attacks, and four defense strategies show the effectiveness of LlmFixer.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T LlmFixer: Fix the Helpfulness of Defensive Large Language Models
%A Yu, Zelong
%A Zhang, Xiaoming
%A Zhang, Litian
%A Yuan, Yu
%A Li, Chaozhuo
%Y Christodoulopoulos, Christos
%Y Chakraborty, Tanmoy
%Y Rose, Carolyn
%Y Peng, Violet
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-335-7
%F yu-etal-2025-llmfixer
%X Defense strategies of large language models besides alignment are introduced to defend against jailbreak attacks, and they have managed to decrease the success rate of jailbreak attacks. However, these defense strategies weakened the helpfulness of large language models. In this work, we propose a universal framework, LlmFixer, acting on large language models equipped with any defense strategy to recover their original helpfulness. LlmFixer consists of an input prompt re-writer and a logic patch. The prompt re-writer is a pre-model for clarifying the intention of input prompts, which promotes large language models to be more helpful to benign inputs and more rejective to malicious inputs. The logic patch is a lightweight structure that enhances large language models’ comprehension capacity by supplementing certain logical relationships. Without updating the parameters of a defensive large language model, LlmFixer fixes its helpfulness while preserving safety. Experiments on three large language models, five jailbreak attacks, and four defense strategies show the effectiveness of LlmFixer.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.989
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.989/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.989
%P 18233-18247
Markdown (Informal)
[LlmFixer: Fix the Helpfulness of Defensive Large Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.989/) (Yu et al., Findings 2025)
ACL