Steering Dialogue Dynamics for Robustness against Multi-turn Jailbreaking Attacks

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to be vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks where adversarial prompts are designed to elicit harmful responses. While existing defenses effectively mitigate single-turn attacks by detecting and filtering unsafe inputs, they fail against multi-turn jailbreaks that exploit contextual drift over multiple interactions, gradually leading LLMs away from safe behavior. To address this challenge, we propose a safety steering framework grounded in safe control theory, ensuring invariant safety in multi-turn dialogues. Our approach models the dialogue with LLMs using state-space representations and introduces a novel neural barrier function (NBF) to detect and filter harmful queries emerging from evolving contexts proactively. Our method achieves invariant safety at each turn of dialogue by learning a safety predictor that accounts for adversarial queries, preventing potential context drift toward jailbreaks. Extensive experiments under multiple LLMs show that our NBF-based safety steering outperforms safety alignment, prompt-based steering and lightweight LLM guardrails baselines, offering stronger defenses against multi-turn jailbreaks while maintaining a better trade-off among safety, helpfulness and over-refusal. Check out the website here https://sites.google.com/view/llm-nbf/home.