# SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01902 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01902/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Jailbreaking](https://mlsanity.com/safety/jailbreaking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02119/) (2023)
- [Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00614/) (2023)
- [How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06373/) (2024)
- [GPTFUZZER: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Auto-Generated Jailbreak Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10253/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13860/) (2023)
- [Jailbreak and Guard Aligned Language Models with Only Few In-Context Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06387/) (2023)
- [GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06463/) (2023)
- [DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreaker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03191/) (2023)
- [Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02446/) (2023)
- [A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Generalized Nested Jailbreak Prompts can Fool Large Language Models Easily](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08268/) (2023)
- [AmpleGCG: Learning a Universal and Transferable Generative Model of Adversarial Suffixes for Jailbreaking Both Open and Closed LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07921/) (2024)
- [Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks Through Goal Prioritization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09096/) (2023)
- [Distract Large Language Models for Automatic Jailbreak Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08424/) (2024)
- [Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Sequential Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07794/) (2024)
- [Evaluating LLMs with Multiple Problems at once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10786/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [FinSafetyBench: Evaluating LLM Safety in Real-World Financial Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00706/) (2026)
- [ArtPerception: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak on LLMs with Recognition Pre-test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10281/) (2025)
- [Align to Misalign: Automatic LLM Jailbreak with Meta-Optimized LLM Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01375/) (2025)
- [Structuring the Space of Sociotechnical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01250/) (2026)
- [Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14808/) (2026)
- [Representational alignment yields generalizable safety in language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04022/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The widespread applications of large language models (LLMs) have brought about concerns regarding their potential misuse. Although aligned with human preference data before release, LLMs remain vulnerable to various malicious attacks. In this paper, we adopt a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM safety and introduce SeqAR, a simple yet effective framework to design jailbreak prompts automatically. The SeqAR framework generates and optimizes multiple jailbreak characters and then applies sequential jailbreak characters in a single query to bypass the guardrails of the target LLM. Different from previous work which relies on proprietary LLMs or seed jailbreak templates crafted by human expertise, SeqAR can generate and optimize the jailbreak prompt in a cold-start scenario using open-sourced LLMs without any seed jailbreak templates. Experimental results show that SeqAR achieves attack success rates of 88% and 60% in bypassing the safety alignment of GPT-3.5-1106 and GPT-4, respectively. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate the transferability of the generated templates across different LLMs and held-out malicious requests, while also exploring defense strategies against the jailbreak attack designed by SeqAR.