Efficient Jailbreaking of Large Models by Freeze Training: Lower Layers Exhibit Greater Sensitivity to Harmful Content
On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking
Abstract (arXiv)
With the widespread application of Large Language Models across various domains, their security issues have increasingly garnered significant attention from both academic and industrial communities. This study conducts sampling and normalization of the parameters of the LLM to generate visual representations and heatmaps of parameter distributions, revealing notable discrepancies in parameter distributions among certain layers within the hidden layers. Further analysis involves calculating statistical metrics for each layer, followed by the computation of a Comprehensive Sensitivity Score based on these metrics, which identifies the lower layers as being particularly sensitive to the generation of harmful content. Based on this finding, we employ a Freeze training strategy, selectively performing Supervised Fine-Tuning only on the lower layers. Experimental results demonstrate that this method significantly reduces training duration and GPU memory consumption while maintaining a high jailbreak success rate and a high harm score, outperforming the results achieved by applying the LoRA method for SFT across all layers. Additionally, the method has been successfully extended to other open-source large models, validating its generality and effectiveness across different model architectures. Furthermore, we compare our method with ohter jailbreak method, demonstrating the superior performance of our approach. By innovatively proposing a method to statistically analyze and compare large model parameters layer by layer, this study provides new insights into the interpretability of large models. These discoveries emphasize the necessity of continuous research and the implementation of adaptive security measures in the rapidly evolving field of LLMs to prevent potential jailbreak attack risks, thereby promoting the development of more robust and secure LLMs.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 17 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.
Builds on
17 of 37 references.
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Same direction, newest first
- 2024How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States9 Jun
- 2023Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries12 Oct
Other references · 15
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
- 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,380
- 2019Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLPcited by 4,236
- 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,780
- 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 3,050
- 2024LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Modelscited by 1,464
- 2023Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!cited by 1,154
- 2024DoRA: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptationcited by 758
- 2017Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapterscited by 557
- 2022Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Build Predictions by Promoting Concepts in the Vocabulary Spacecited by 532
- 2024GaLore: Memory-Efficient LLM Training by Gradient Low-Rank Projectioncited by 463
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- 2024PrisonBreak: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with at Most Twenty-Five Targeted Bit-flips
- 2025JailDAM: Jailbreak Detection with Adaptive Memory for Vision-Language Model
- 2024Harnessing Task Overload for Scalable Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models
- 2024Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks via Layer-specific Editing
- 2024JailBreakV: A Benchmark for Assessing the Robustness of MultiModal Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks
- 2024JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
- 2024AttnGCG: Enhancing Jailbreaking Attacks on LLMs with Attention Manipulation
- 2026MultiBreak: A Scalable and Diverse Multi-turn Jailbreak Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Safety