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EMNLP Findings2025

LlmFixer: Fix the Helpfulness of Defensive Large Language Models

Zelong Yu, Xiaoming Zhang, Litian Zhang, Yu Yuan, Chaozhuo Li

Abstract

Defense strategies of large language models besides alignment are introduced to defend against jailbreak attacks, and they have managed to decrease the success rate of jailbreak attacks. However, these defense strategies weakened the helpfulness of large language models. In this work, we propose a universal framework LlmFixer acting on large language models equipped with any defense strategy to recover their original helpfulness. LlmFixer consists of an input prompt re-writer and a logic patch. The prompt re-writer is a pre-model for clarifying the intention of input prompts, which promotes large language models to be more helpful to benign inputs and more rejective to malicious inputs. The logic patch is a lightweight structure that enhances large language models' comprehension capacity by supplementing certain logical relationships. Without updating the parameters of a defensive large language model, LlmFixer fixes its helpfulness while preserving safety. Experiments on three large language models, five jailbreak attacks, and four defense strategies show the effectiveness of LlmFixer.

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Builds on18

  1. Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward ModelRafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Christopher D. Manning et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 10,924 citations
  2. Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?Alexander Wei, Nika Haghtalab, Jacob SteinhardtNeurIPS 2023 · 2,230 citations
  3. AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated PromptsTaylor Shin, Yasaman Razeghi, Robert L. Logan IV, Eric Wallace et al.EMNLP 2020 · 1,162 citations
  4. Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!Xiangyu Qi, Yi Zeng, Tinghao Xie, Pin-Yu Chen et al.ICLR 2024 · 1,104 citations
  5. AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language ModelsXiaogeng Liu, Nan Xu, Muhao Chen, Chaowei XiaoICLR 2024 · 722 citations

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