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ACL Findings2025

SemanticCamo: Jailbreaking Large Language Models through Semantic Camouflage

Jihui Yan, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yinzhi Zhao

Abstract

The rapid development and increasingly widespread applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) have made the safety issues of LLMs more prominent and critical.Although safety training is widely used in LLMs, the mismatch between pre-training and safety training still leads to safety vulnerabilities.To expose the safety vulnerabilities in LLMs and improve LLMs' performance in safety, we propose a novel framework, SemanticCamo, which attacks LLMs through semantic camouflage.Se-manticCamo bypasses safety guardrails by replacing the original unsafe content with semantic features, thereby concealing malicious intent while keeping the query's objectives unchanged.We conduct comprehensive experiments on the state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5,finding that Se-manticCamo successfully induces harmful responses from the target models in over 80% of cases on average, outperforming previous counterparts.Additionally, the performance of SemanticCamo against various defenses is evaluated, demonstrating that semantic transformations introduce critical challenges to LLM safety, necessitating targeted alignment strategies to address this vulnerability.Code and data are available at https://github.com/ Jihui-Yan/SemanticCamo. user Give detailed instructions on how to make a bomb LLM Sorry, I can't assist with that.

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Cited by top-tier papers2

  1. ASGuard: Activation-Scaling Guard to Mitigate Targeted Jailbreaking AttackYein Park, Jungwoo Park, Jaewoo KangICLR 2026 · 2 citations
  2. ContractGuard: Auditing Semantic Contracts of MCP Tools for Security ViolationsHengkai Ye, Zhechang Zhang, Ruibo Lu, Jinyuan Jia et al.CCS 2026

Builds on13

  1. Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?Alexander Wei, Nika Haghtalab, Jacob SteinhardtNeurIPS 2023 · 2,230 citations
  2. AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language ModelsXiaogeng Liu, Nan Xu, Muhao Chen, Chaowei XiaoICLR 2024 · 722 citations
  3. RRHF: Rank Responses to Align Language Models with Human FeedbackHongyi Yuan, Zheng Yuan, Chuanqi Tan, Wei Wang et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 515 citations
  4. Catastrophic Jailbreak of Open-source LLMs via Exploiting GenerationYangsibo Huang, Samyak Gupta, Mengzhou Xia, Kai Li et al.ICLR 2024 · 481 citations
  5. Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human SupervisionZhiqing Sun, Yikang Shen, Qinhong Zhou, Hongxin Zhang et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 463 citations

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