CEE: An Inference-Time Jailbreak Defense for Embodied Intelligence via Subspace Concept Rotation

Jirui Yang, Zheyu Lin, Zhihui Lu, Yinggui Wang, Lei Wang, Tao Wei, Qiang Duan, Xin Du, Shuhan Yang


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for task understanding and action planning in embodied intelligence (EI) systems, but their adoption substantially increases vulnerability to jailbreak attacks. While recent work explores inference-time defenses, existing methods rely on static interventions on intermediate representations, which often degrade generation quality and impair adherence to task instructions, reducing system usability in EI settings. We propose a dynamic defense framework. For each EI inference request, we dynamically construct a task-specific safety-semantic subspace, project its hidden state to the most relevant direction, and apply SLERP rotation for adaptive safety control. At comparable defense success rates, our method preserves generation quality, improves usability, reduces tuning cost, and strengthens robustness in EI scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.758
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15965–15996
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.758/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jirui Yang, Zheyu Lin, Zhihui Lu, Yinggui Wang, Lei Wang, Tao Wei, Qiang Duan, Xin Du, and Shuhan Yang. 2026. CEE: An Inference-Time Jailbreak Defense for Embodied Intelligence via Subspace Concept Rotation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 15965–15996, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CEE: An Inference-Time Jailbreak Defense for Embodied Intelligence via Subspace Concept Rotation (Yang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.758.pdf