from Benign import Toxic: Jailbreaking the Language Model via Adversarial Metaphors
On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking
Abstract (arXiv)
Current studies have exposed the risk of Large Language Models (LLMs) generating harmful content by jailbreak attacks. However, they overlook that the direct generation of harmful content from scratch is more difficult than inducing LLM to calibrate benign content into harmful forms. In our study, we introduce a novel attack framework that exploits AdVersArial meTAphoR (AVATAR) to induce the LLM to calibrate malicious metaphors for jailbreaking. Specifically, to answer harmful queries, AVATAR adaptively identifies a set of benign but logically related metaphors as the initial seed. Then, driven by these metaphors, the target LLM is induced to reason and calibrate about the metaphorical content, thus jailbroken by either directly outputting harmful responses or calibrating residuals between metaphorical and professional harmful content. Experimental results demonstrate that AVATAR can effectively and transferable jailbreak LLMs and achieve a state-of-the-art attack success rate across multiple advanced LLMs.
Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2025.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 9.
15 papers.
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- 2026SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinementcited by 30
- 2025Confusion is the Final Barrier: Rethinking Jailbreak Evaluation and Investigating the Real Misuse Threat of LLMscited by 11
- 2026Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modelingcited by 6
- 2025When Smiley Turns Hostile: Interpreting How Emojis Trigger LLMs' Toxicitycited by 2
- 2025Jailbreaking LLMs via Semantically Relevant Nested Scenarios with Targeted Toxic Knowledgecited by 2
- 2026COMPASS: A Framework for Evaluating Organization-Specific Policy Alignment in LLMscited by 2
- 2025Sentra-Guard: A Real-Time Multilingual Defense Against Adversarial LLM Promptscited by 1
- 2025ASTRA: An Automated Framework for Strategy Discovery, Retrieval, and Evolution for Jailbreaking LLMscited by 1
- 2026The Illusion of Cross-Lingual Safety in Low-Resource Languagescited by 1
- 2025Involuntary Jailbreak: On Self-Prompting Attackscited by 0
- 2026Beneath the Surface: Investigating LLMs' Capabilities for Communicating with Subtextcited by 0
- 2026Babel: Jailbreaking Safety Attention via Obfuscation Distribution Optimized Samplingcited by 0
- 2026IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks3 Sep 2026
- 2026The Illusion of Cross-Lingual Safety in Low-Resource Languages11 Aug 2026
- 2026A Multimodal Automatic Redteaming Evaluation based on Atomic Jailbreak Strategy Decoupling and Combination3 Aug 2026
- 2026Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence27 Jul 2026
- 2026Babel: Jailbreaking Safety Attention via Obfuscation Distribution Optimized Sampling18 May 2026
- 2026Beneath the Surface: Investigating LLMs' Capabilities for Communicating with Subtext7 Apr 2026
- 2026SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinement5 Apr 2026
- 2026Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling19 Jan 2026
- 2026COMPASS: A Framework for Evaluating Organization-Specific Policy Alignment in LLMs5 Jan 2026
- 2025ASTRA: An Automated Framework for Strategy Discovery, Retrieval, and Evolution for Jailbreaking LLMs4 Nov 2025
- 2025Sentra-Guard: A Real-Time Multilingual Defense Against Adversarial LLM Prompts26 Oct 2025
- 2025Jailbreaking LLMs via Semantically Relevant Nested Scenarios with Targeted Toxic Knowledge22 Sep 2025
- 2025Jailbreaking LLMs via Semantically Relevant Nested Scenarios with Targeted Toxic Knowledgecited by 2
- 2025Sentra-Guard: A Real-Time Multilingual Defense Against Adversarial LLM Promptscited by 1
- 2026The Illusion of Cross-Lingual Safety in Low-Resource Languagescited by 1
- 2025Involuntary Jailbreak: On Self-Prompting Attackscited by 0
- 2026A Multimodal Automatic Redteaming Evaluation based on Atomic Jailbreak Strategy Decoupling and Combinationcited by 0
- 2026IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attackscited by 0
- 2026IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks3 Sep 2026
- 2026The Illusion of Cross-Lingual Safety in Low-Resource Languages11 Aug 2026
- 2026A Multimodal Automatic Redteaming Evaluation based on Atomic Jailbreak Strategy Decoupling and Combination3 Aug 2026
- 2025Sentra-Guard: A Real-Time Multilingual Defense Against Adversarial LLM Prompts26 Oct 2025
- 2025Jailbreaking LLMs via Semantically Relevant Nested Scenarios with Targeted Toxic Knowledge22 Sep 2025
- 2025Involuntary Jailbreak: On Self-Prompting Attacks18 Aug 2025
- 2026Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modelingcited by 6
- 2025When Smiley Turns Hostile: Interpreting How Emojis Trigger LLMs' Toxicitycited by 2
- 2026COMPASS: A Framework for Evaluating Organization-Specific Policy Alignment in LLMscited by 2
- 2026Beneath the Surface: Investigating LLMs' Capabilities for Communicating with Subtextcited by 0
- 2026Beneath the Surface: Investigating LLMs' Capabilities for Communicating with Subtext7 Apr 2026
- 2026Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling19 Jan 2026
- 2026COMPASS: A Framework for Evaluating Organization-Specific Policy Alignment in LLMs5 Jan 2026
- 2025When Smiley Turns Hostile: Interpreting How Emojis Trigger LLMs' Toxicity14 Sep 2025
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- 2024Na'vi or Knave: Jailbreaking Language Models via Metaphorical Avatars
- 2025Metaphor-based Jailbreak Attacks on Text-to-Image Models
- 2025Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models
- 2025Benign-to-Toxic Jailbreaking: Inducing Harmful Responses from Harmless Prompts
- 2024Unleashing the Unseen: Harnessing Benign Datasets for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
- 2025Safe2Harm: Semantic Isomorphism Attacks for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
- 2025Say It Differently: Linguistic Styles as Jailbreak Vectors
- 2024JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Models