Faster-GCG: Efficient Discrete Optimization Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Xiao, Zhang, Wei, Li, Zhuhong, Li, Qiongxiu, PernChua, Shei, Lee, BingZe, Cui, Jinghao, Huang, Yifan, Hu, Xiaolin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866917508543414272
author Li, Xiao
Zhang, Wei
Li, Zhuhong
Li, Qiongxiu
PernChua, Shei
Lee, BingZe
Cui, Jinghao
Huang, Yifan
Hu, Xiaolin
author_facet Li, Xiao
Zhang, Wei
Li, Zhuhong
Li, Qiongxiu
PernChua, Shei
Lee, BingZe
Cui, Jinghao
Huang, Yifan
Hu, Xiaolin
contents Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for their safety, particularly in the context of jailbreak attacks that attempt to bypass guardrails via adversarial prompts. Among existing approaches, the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack pioneered automated jailbreaks through discrete token optimization; however, its low sample efficiency limits practical applicability. In particular, GCG requires approximately 256K evaluations per harmful behavior to achieve a satisfactory jailbreak success rate, due to the inherent difficulty of the underlying discrete optimization problem. In this work, we identify three key factors that limit the sample efficiency of GCG: inaccurate gradient-based estimation, inefficient uniform sampling, and repeated evaluation of previously explored suffixes. To address these issues, we propose Faster-GCG, a streamlined variant of GCG that incorporates distance-based regularization for improved estimation, temperature-controlled sampling for more effective exploration, and a visited-suffix marking mechanism to avoid redundant evaluations. Faster-GCG reduced the required evaluations to 32K, achieving up to an $8\times$ improvement in sampling efficiency and a $7\times$ reduction in wall-clock time compared to GCG. Under this reduced budget, Faster-GCG attained an average jailbreak success rate of 78.1\% across five aligned LLMs, and achieved 88.7\% against Qwen3.5-4B, outperforming state-of-the-art white-box jailbreak methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_15362
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Faster-GCG: Efficient Discrete Optimization Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned Large Language Models
Li, Xiao
Zhang, Wei
Li, Zhuhong
Li, Qiongxiu
PernChua, Shei
Lee, BingZe
Cui, Jinghao
Huang, Yifan
Hu, Xiaolin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for their safety, particularly in the context of jailbreak attacks that attempt to bypass guardrails via adversarial prompts. Among existing approaches, the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack pioneered automated jailbreaks through discrete token optimization; however, its low sample efficiency limits practical applicability. In particular, GCG requires approximately 256K evaluations per harmful behavior to achieve a satisfactory jailbreak success rate, due to the inherent difficulty of the underlying discrete optimization problem. In this work, we identify three key factors that limit the sample efficiency of GCG: inaccurate gradient-based estimation, inefficient uniform sampling, and repeated evaluation of previously explored suffixes. To address these issues, we propose Faster-GCG, a streamlined variant of GCG that incorporates distance-based regularization for improved estimation, temperature-controlled sampling for more effective exploration, and a visited-suffix marking mechanism to avoid redundant evaluations. Faster-GCG reduced the required evaluations to 32K, achieving up to an $8\times$ improvement in sampling efficiency and a $7\times$ reduction in wall-clock time compared to GCG. Under this reduced budget, Faster-GCG attained an average jailbreak success rate of 78.1\% across five aligned LLMs, and achieved 88.7\% against Qwen3.5-4B, outperforming state-of-the-art white-box jailbreak methods.
title Faster-GCG: Efficient Discrete Optimization Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15362