Junjie Yang
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Junjie Yang
2026
SQD: Sub-Query Decomposition for Reliable Jailbreak Evaluation in Large Language Models
Junjie Yang | Fenghua Weng | Yue Xu | Wenjie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Junjie Yang | Fenghua Weng | Yue Xu | Wenjie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Existing jailbreak classifiers for large language models (LLMs) often fail to distinguish truly harmful responses from benign paraphrases, resulting in high error rates. We reframe jailbreak detection as a strict instruction-following verification task rather than holistic semantic matching. To achieve this, we propose Sub-Query Decomposition (SQD), a framework that breaks complex adversarial prompts into atomic, actionable sub-intents. SQD transforms opaque safety assessment into a parameterizable adjudication protocol, allowing practitioners to quantitatively adjust safety boundaries via explicit mathematical aggregation rules for highly interpretable evaluation. To operationalize SQD at scale, we introduce three foundational pillars: (1) Efficient Deployment via distilled lightweight models, featuring SQD-Phi-4 for single-pass end-to-end verification and SQD-Decomposer, optimized with an entropy-aware loss to mathematically prevent the omission of rare constraints; (2) Evaluation Foundation through SQD-Bench, a rigorously human-annotated dataset; and (3) LLM-independent Judge via E(mbedding)-TFIDF to eliminate inference-time reasoning bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our unified framework provides a transparent, low-cost, and policy-aligned standard for reliable jailbreak evaluation.