Enhancing the Transferability of Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Exploiting Reparameterization Invariance
Ao Wang, Xinghao Yang, Yongshun Gong, Wei Liu, Bao-di Liu, Weifeng Liu
Abstract
Jailbreak attacks serve as a pivotal technique for evaluating the safety alignment of Large language models. Current token-level attacks have shown remarkable efficacy on open-source models by leveraging gradient-based optimization. However, these attacks suffer from poor cross-model transferability, severely limiting their utility on proprietary ones. To address this limitation, we propose Reparameterization Invariance Gradient-based Jailbreak (RIGJ), a natural gradient based framework designed to improve cross-model transferability. Unlike prior token-level methods whose optimization paths are constrained by model-specific Euclidean geometry, RIGJ defines update directions according to differences in output distributions rather than parameter-space distances. Since language models are trained to capture similar dependency structures of natural language, their output distributions share common geometry across architectures, yielding intrinsically model-agnostic optimization trajectories and substantially stronger jailbreak transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance, increasing the cross-model Attack Success Rate and Average Harmfulness Score by 14.9% and 1.23, respectively. Our code is provided in https://github.com/nohuma/AISafety_ transfer_jailbreak_RIGJ_2026 .
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