AGENTIC-SYSTEMSJuly 24, 20261 min read

Incomplete Prompt Jailbreaks in Large Language Models

Researchers have conceptualized Incomplete Prompt Jailbreaks (IPJ), a vulnerability where incomplete harmful prompts bypass LLM safeguards due to delayed refusal behaviors. The discovery of functional neurons offers a novel path for precise neuron-level defense interventions.

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title: Incomplete Prompt Jailbreaks in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly released as open-weight models with safeguards against harmful requests. Nevertheless, sentence completion remains vulnerable to incomplete harmful prompts. In this work, we formalize this phenomenon as incomplete prompt jailbreaks (IPJ) and provide a systematic empirical characterization of when and how incomplete prompts elicit harmful continuations.

We analyze diverse attractor types associated with incomplete sentence continuation and show that LLMs systematically delay refusal until sentence termination. We further demonstrate that training models to refuse incomplete harmful prompts via parameter tuning is insufficient, failing to generalize across both content domains and attractor types.

To enable fine-grained control, we identify two functional neurons: termination and continuation neurons. By clarifying their roles in sentence completion, we highlight the potential of neuron-level interventions for more precise and robust IPJ defenses.

Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent

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