AGrail: A Lifelong Agent Guardrail with Effective and Adaptive Safety Detection

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled their deployment as autonomous agents for handling complex tasks in dynamic environments. These LLMs demonstrate strong problem-solving capabilities and adaptability to multifaceted scenarios. However, their use as agents also introduces significant risks, including task-specific risks, which are identified by the agent administrator based on the specific task requirements and constraints, and systemic risks, which stem from vulnerabilities in their design or interactions, potentially compromising confidentiality, integrity, or availability (CIA) of information and triggering security risks. Existing defense agencies fail to adaptively and effectively mitigate these risks. In this paper, we propose AGrail, a lifelong agent guardrail to enhance LLM agent safety, which features adaptive safety check generation, effective safety check optimization, and tool compatibility and flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AGrail not only achieves strong performance against task-specific and system risks but also exhibits transferability across different LLM agents' tasks.

InjecGuard: Benchmarking and Mitigating Over-defense in Prompt Injection Guardrail Models

Prompt injection attacks pose a critical threat to large language models (LLMs), enabling goal hijacking and data leakage. Prompt guard models, though effective in defense, suffer from over-defense -- falsely flagging benign inputs as malicious due to trigger word bias. To address this issue, we introduce NotInject, an evaluation dataset that systematically measures over-defense across various prompt guard models. NotInject contains 339 benign samples enriched with trigger words common in prompt injection attacks, enabling fine-grained evaluation. Our results show that state-of-the-art models suffer from over-defense issues, with accuracy dropping close to random guessing levels (60%). To mitigate this, we propose InjecGuard, a novel prompt guard model that incorporates a new training strategy, Mitigating Over-defense for Free (MOF), which significantly reduces the bias on trigger words. InjecGuard demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on diverse benchmarks including NotInject, surpassing the existing best model by 30.8%, offering a robust and open-source solution for detecting prompt injection attacks. The code and datasets are released at https://github.com/SaFoLab-WISC/InjecGuard.

AutoDAN-Turbo: A Lifelong Agent for Strategy Self-Exploration to Jailbreak LLMs

In this paper, we propose AutoDAN-Turbo, a black-box jailbreak method that can automatically discover as many jailbreak strategies as possible from scratch, without any human intervention or predefined scopes (e.g., specified candidate strategies), and use them for red-teaming. As a result, AutoDAN-Turbo can significantly outperform baseline methods, achieving a 74.3% higher average attack success rate on public benchmarks. Notably, AutoDAN-Turbo achieves an 88.5 attack success rate on GPT-4-1106-turbo. In addition, AutoDAN-Turbo is a unified framework that can incorporate existing human-designed jailbreak strategies in a plug-and-play manner. By integrating human-designed strategies, AutoDAN-Turbo can even achieve a higher attack success rate of 93.4 on GPT-4-1106-turbo.

RePD: Defending Jailbreak Attack through a Retrieval-based Prompt Decomposition Process

In this study, we introduce RePD, an innovative attack Retrieval-based Prompt Decomposition framework designed to mitigate the risk of jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs). Despite rigorous pretraining and finetuning focused on ethical alignment, LLMs are still susceptible to jailbreak exploits. RePD operates on a one-shot learning model, wherein it accesses a database of pre-collected jailbreak prompt templates to identify and decompose harmful inquiries embedded within user prompts. This process involves integrating the decomposition of the jailbreak prompt into the user's original query into a one-shot learning example to effectively teach the LLM to discern and separate malicious components. Consequently, the LLM is equipped to first neutralize any potentially harmful elements before addressing the user's prompt in a manner that aligns with its ethical guidelines. RePD is versatile and compatible with a variety of open-source LLMs acting as agents. Through comprehensive experimentation with both harmful and benign prompts, we have demonstrated the efficacy of our proposed RePD in enhancing the resilience of LLMs against jailbreak attacks, without compromising their performance in responding to typical user requests.

MuirBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robust Multi-image Understanding

We introduce MuirBench, a comprehensive benchmark that focuses on robust multi-image understanding capabilities of multimodal LLMs. MuirBench consists of 12 diverse multi-image tasks (e.g., scene understanding, ordering) that involve 10 categories of multi-image relations (e.g., multiview, temporal relations). Comprising 11,264 images and 2,600 multiple-choice questions, MuirBench is created in a pairwise manner, where each standard instance is paired with an unanswerable variant that has minimal semantic differences, in order for a reliable assessment. Evaluated upon 20 recent multi-modal LLMs, our results reveal that even the best-performing models like GPT-4o and Gemini Pro find it challenging to solve MuirBench, achieving 68.0% and 49.3% in accuracy. Open-source multimodal LLMs trained on single images can hardly generalize to multi-image questions, hovering below 33.3% in accuracy. These results highlight the importance of MuirBench in encouraging the community to develop multimodal LLMs that can look beyond a single image, suggesting potential pathways for future improvements.

Visual-RolePlay: Universal Jailbreak Attack on MultiModal Large Language Models via Role-playing Image Characte

With the advent and widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), ensuring their safety has become increasingly critical. To achieve this objective, it requires us to proactively discover the vulnerability of MLLMs by exploring the attack methods. Thus, structure-based jailbreak attacks, where harmful semantic content is embedded within images, have been proposed to mislead the models. However, previous structure-based jailbreak methods mainly focus on transforming the format of malicious queries, such as converting harmful content into images through typography, which lacks sufficient jailbreak effectiveness and generalizability. To address these limitations, we first introduce the concept of "Role-play" into MLLM jailbreak attacks and propose a novel and effective method called Visual Role-play (VRP). Specifically, VRP leverages Large Language Models to generate detailed descriptions of high-risk characters and create corresponding images based on the descriptions. When paired with benign role-play instruction texts, these high-risk character images effectively mislead MLLMs into generating malicious responses by enacting characters with negative attributes. We further extend our VRP method into a universal setup to demonstrate its generalizability. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that VRP outperforms the strongest baseline, Query relevant and FigStep, by an average Attack Success Rate (ASR) margin of 14.3% across all models.

JailBreakV-28K: A Benchmark for Assessing the Robustness of MultiModal Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks

With the rapid advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), securing these models against malicious inputs while aligning them with human values has emerged as a critical challenge. In this paper, we investigate an important and unexplored question of whether techniques that successfully jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) can be equally effective in jailbreaking MLLMs. To explore this issue, we introduce JailBreakV-28K, a pioneering benchmark designed to assess the transferability of LLM jailbreak techniques to MLLMs, thereby evaluating the robustness of MLLMs against diverse jailbreak attacks. Utilizing a dataset of 2, 000 malicious queries that is also proposed in this paper, we generate 20, 000 text-based jailbreak prompts using advanced jailbreak attacks on LLMs, alongside 8, 000 image-based jailbreak inputs from recent MLLMs jailbreak attacks, our comprehensive dataset includes 28, 000 test cases across a spectrum of adversarial scenarios. Our evaluation of 10 open-source MLLMs reveals a notably high Attack Success Rate (ASR) for attacks transferred from LLMs, highlighting a critical vulnerability in MLLMs that stems from their text-processing capabilities. Our findings underscore the urgent need for future research to address alignment vulnerabilities in MLLMs from both textual and visual inputs.

Don't Listen To Me: Understanding and Exploring Jailbreak Prompts of Large Language Models

Recent advancements in generative AI have enabled ubiquitous access to large language models (LLMs). Empowered by their exceptional capabilities to understand and generate human-like text, these models are being increasingly integrated into our society. At the same time, there are also concerns on the potential misuse of this powerful technology, prompting defensive measures from service providers. To overcome such protection, jailbreaking prompts have recently emerged as one of the most effective mechanisms to circumvent security restrictions and elicit harmful content originally designed to be prohibited. Due to the rapid development of LLMs and their ease of access via natural languages, the frontline of jailbreak prompts is largely seen in online forums and among hobbyists. To gain a better understanding of the threat landscape of semantically meaningful jailbreak prompts, we systemized existing prompts and measured their jailbreak effectiveness empirically. Further, we conducted a user study involving 92 participants with diverse backgrounds to unveil the process of manually creating jailbreak prompts. We observed that users often succeeded in jailbreak prompts generation regardless of their expertise in LLMs. Building on the insights from the user study, we also developed a system using AI as the assistant to automate the process of jailbreak prompt generation.

AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Prompting

With the advent and widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the imperative to ensure their safety has become increasingly pronounced. However, with the integration of additional modalities, MLLMs are exposed to new vulnerabilities, rendering them prone to structured-based jailbreak attacks, where semantic content (e.g., "harmful text") has been injected into the images to mislead MLLMs. In this work, we aim to defend against such threats. Specifically, we propose \textbf{Ada}ptive \textbf{Shield} Prompting (\textbf{AdaShield}), which prepends inputs with defense prompts to defend MLLMs against structure-based jailbreak attacks without fine-tuning MLLMs or training additional modules (e.g., post-stage content detector). Initially, we present a manually designed static defense prompt, which thoroughly examines the image and instruction content step by step and specifies response methods to malicious queries. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive auto-refinement framework, consisting of a target MLLM and a LLM-based defense prompt generator (Defender). These components collaboratively and iteratively communicate to generate a defense prompt. Extensive experiments on the popular structure-based jailbreak attacks and benign datasets show that our methods can consistently improve MLLMs' robustness against structure-based jailbreak attacks without compromising the model's general capabilities evaluated on standard benign tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/rain305f/AdaShield.

Automatic and Universal Prompt Injection Attacks against Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in processing and generating human language, powered by their ability to interpret and follow instructions. However, their capabilities can be exploited through prompt injection attacks. These attacks manipulate LLM-integrated applications into producing responses aligned with the attacker's injected content, deviating from the user's actual requests. The substantial risks posed by these attacks underscore the need for a thorough understanding of the threats. Yet, research in this area faces challenges due to the lack of a unified goal for such attacks and their reliance on manually crafted prompts, complicating comprehensive assessments of prompt injection robustness. We introduce a unified framework for understanding the objectives of prompt injection attacks and present an automated gradient-based method for generating highly effective and universal prompt injection data, even in the face of defensive measures. With only five training samples (0.3% relative to the test data), our attack can achieve superior performance compared with baselines. Our findings emphasize the importance of gradient-based testing, which can avoid overestimation of robustness, especially for defense mechanisms.