# Defending Large Language Models Against Attacks With Residual Stream Activation Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01405/) (2023)
- [Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09527/) (2022)
- [Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00614/) (2023)
- [TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02385/) (2024)
- [JailBreakV: A Benchmark for Assessing the Robustness of MultiModal Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03027/) (2024)
- [Model-tuning Via Prompts Makes NLP Models Adversarially Robust](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07320/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SoK: Evaluating Jailbreak Guardrails for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10597/) (2025)
- [Analysing the Safety Pitfalls of Steering Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24543/) (2026)
- [Meaningless Tokens, Meaningful Gains: How Activation Shifts Enhance LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01032/) (2025)
- [AttentionDefense: Leveraging System Prompt Attention for Explainable Defense Against Novel Jailbreaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12321/) (2025)
- [ShadowLogic: Backdoors in Any Whitebox LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00664/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by OpenAI's ChatGPT, brings to the forefront the imperative to defend against adversarial threats on these models. These attacks, which manipulate an LLM's output by introducing malicious inputs, undermine the model's integrity and the trust users place in its outputs. In response to this challenge, our paper presents an innovative defensive strategy, given white box access to an LLM, that harnesses residual activation analysis between transformer layers of the LLM. We apply a novel methodology for analyzing distinctive activation patterns in the residual streams for attack prompt classification. We curate multiple datasets to demonstrate how this method of classification has high accuracy across multiple types of attack scenarios, including our newly-created attack dataset. Furthermore, we enhance the model's resilience by integrating safety fine-tuning techniques for LLMs in order to measure its effect on our capability to detect attacks. The results underscore the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing the detection and mitigation of adversarial inputs, advancing the security framework within which LLMs operate.