Jinjun Peng
Author directory2026
Jailbreaking Jailbreaks: A Proactive Defense for LLMs
Weiliang Zhao | Daniel Ben-Levi | Jinjun Peng | Zhou Yu | Junfeng Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Weiliang Zhao | Daniel Ben-Levi | Jinjun Peng | Zhou Yu | Junfeng Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
The proliferation of powerful large language models (LLMs) has necessitated robust safety alignment, yet these models remain vulnerable to evolving adversarial attacks, including multi-turn jailbreaks that iteratively search for successful queries. Current defenses, which are primarily reactive and static, often fail to handle these iterative attacks. In this paper, we introduce ProAct, a novel proactive defense framework designed to disrupt and mislead these iterative search jailbreak methods. Our core idea is to intentionally mislead these jailbreak methods into thinking that the model has been jailbroken with "spurious responses". These misleading responses provide false signals to the attacker’s internal optimization loop, causing the adversarial search to terminate prematurely and effectively jailbreaking the jailbreak. By conducting extensive experiments across state-of-the-art LLMs, jailbreaking frameworks, and safety benchmarks, we demonstrate that our method consistently and significantly reduces attack success rates by up to 94% without affecting utility. When combined with other defense frameworks, it further reduces the latest attack strategies’ success rate to 0%. ProAct represents an orthogonal defense strategy that serves as an additional guardrail to enhance LLM safety against the most effective jailbreaking attacks.