Knowledge-Driven Multi-Turn Jailbreaking on Large Language Models
On the map: LLM safety and security → Jailbreaking
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) face a significant threat from multi-turn jailbreak attacks, where adversaries progressively steer conversations to elicit harmful outputs. However, the practical effectiveness of existing attacks is undermined by several critical limitations: they struggle to maintain a coherent progression over long interactions, often losing track of what has been accomplished and what remains to be done; they rely on rigid or pre-defined patterns, and fail to adapt to the LLM's dynamic and unpredictable conversational state. To address these shortcomings, we introduce Mastermind, a multi-turn jailbreak framework that adopts a dynamic and self-improving approach. Mastermind operates in a closed loop of planning, execution, and reflection, enabling it to autonomously build and refine its knowledge of model vulnerabilities through interaction. It employs a hierarchical planning architecture that decouples high-level attack objectives from low-level tactical execution, ensuring long-term focus and coherence. This planning is guided by a knowledge repository that autonomously discovers and refines effective attack patterns by reflecting on interactive experiences. Mastermind leverages this accumulated knowledge to dynamically recombine and adapt attack vectors, dramatically improving both effectiveness and resilience. We conduct comprehensive experiments against state-of-the-art models, including GPT-5 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The results demonstrate that Mastermind significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving substantially higher attack success rates and harmfulness ratings. Moreover, our framework exhibits notable resilience against multiple advanced defense mechanisms.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security. Builds on 70 of its 81 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.
Builds on
70 of 81 references.
Closest ancestors · 37
Same direction, newest first
- 2025OmniSafeBench-MM: A Unified Benchmark and Toolbox for Multimodal Jailbreak Attack-Defense Evaluation6 Dec
- 2025NEXUS: Network Exploration for eXploiting Unsafe Sequences in Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreaks3 Oct
- 2025Cannot See the Forest for the Trees: Invoking Heuristics and Biases to Elicit Irrational Choices of LLMs3 May
- 2025X-Teaming: Multi-Turn Jailbreaks and Defenses with Adaptive Multi-Agents15 Apr
- 2025Reasoning-Augmented Conversation for Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models16 Feb
- 2025JBShield: Defending Large Language Models from Jailbreak Attacks through Activated Concept Analysis and Manipulation11 Feb
- 2025Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming31 Jan
- 2025Siren: A Learning-Based Multi-Turn Attack Framework for Simulating Real-World Human Jailbreak Behaviors24 Jan
- 2024MRJ-Agent: An Effective Jailbreak Agent for Multi-Round Dialogue6 Nov
- 2024AutoDAN-Turbo: A Lifelong Agent for Strategy Self-Exploration to Jailbreak LLMs3 Oct
- 2024Endless Jailbreaks with Bijection Learning2 Oct
- 2024LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yet27 Aug
25 more
- 2024Multi-Turn Context Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models From First Principles8 Aug
- 2024Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey5 Jul
- 2024Improved Techniques for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Models31 May
- 2024Boosting Jailbreak Attack with Momentum2 May
- 2024AdvPrompter: Fast Adaptive Adversarial Prompting for LLMs21 Apr
- 2024AmpleGCG: Learning a Universal and Transferable Generative Model of Adversarial Suffixes for Jailbreaking Both Open and Closed LLMs11 Apr
- 2024Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack2 Apr
- 2024Gradient Cuff: Detecting Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models by Exploring Refusal Loss Landscapes1 Mar
- 2024Making Them Ask and Answer: Jailbreaking Large Language Models in Few Queries via Disguise and Reconstruction28 Feb
- 2024Speak Out of Turn: Safety Vulnerability of Large Language Models in Multi-turn Dialogue27 Feb
- 2024Is the System Message Really Important to Jailbreaks in Large Language Models?20 Feb
- 2024SafeDecoding: Defending against Jailbreak Attacks via Safety-Aware Decoding14 Feb
- 2024How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs12 Jan
- 2023Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically4 Dec
- 2023DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreaker6 Nov
- 2023Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries12 Oct
- 2023Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Models10 Oct
- 2023SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks5 Oct
- 2023AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Models3 Oct
- 2023Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-43 Oct
- 2023Defending Against Alignment-Breaking Attacks via Robustly Aligned LLM18 Sep
- 2023FuzzLLM: A Novel and Universal Fuzzing Framework for Proactively Discovering Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models11 Sep
- 2023GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher12 Aug
- 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models27 Jul
- 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?5 Jul
Other references · 33
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
- 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
- 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,747
- 2022Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 3,634
- 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,203
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversationcited by 1,906
- 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,761
21 more
- 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
- 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,348
- 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusalcited by 1,330
- 2024Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Reportcited by 1,151
- 2023Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversationscited by 1,124
- 2023ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Developmentcited by 893
- 2023Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Modelscited by 608
- 2024WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMscited by 460
- 2023Safety-Tuned LLaMAs: Lessons From Improving the Safety of Large Language Models that Follow Instructionscited by 377
- 2020A Simple Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialoguecited by 331
- 2023Exploiting Programmatic Behavior of LLMs: Dual-Use Through Standard Security Attackscited by 268
- 2024MT-Bench-101: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialoguescited by 247
- 2024ShieldGemma: Generative AI Content Moderation Based on Gemmacited by 224
- 2024ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMscited by 197
- 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systemscited by 170
- 2024On Prompt-Driven Safeguarding for Large Language Modelscited by 109
- 2025H-CoT: Hijacking the Chain-of-Thought Safety Reasoning Mechanism to Jailbreak Large Reasoning Models, Including OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinkingcited by 94
- 2023Attack Prompt Generation for Red Teaming and Defending Large Language Modelscited by 73
- 2024Chain of Attack: a Semantic-Driven Contextual Multi-Turn attacker for LLMcited by 73
- 2024Holistic Automated Red Teaming for Large Language Models through Top-Down Test Case Generation and Multi-turn Interactioncited by 25
- 2023Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Modelscited by 15
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026Not All Turns Matter: Credit Assignment for Multi-Turn Jailbreakingcited by 1
- 2026D-Judge: Disrupting Multi-Turn Jailbreaks using Semantics-Preserving Output Rewritingcited by 1
- 2026Recursive language models for jailbreak detection: a procedural defense for tool-augmented agentscited by 0
- 2026Mitigating Many-shot Jailbreak Attacks with One Single Demonstrationcited by 0
- 2026BAIT: Boundary-Guided Disclosure Escalation LLM Jailbreaking via Self-Conditioned Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026On the Limits of Support-Preserving Alignment and Bounded Filteringcited by 0
- 2026On the Limits of Support-Preserving Alignment and Bounded Filtering1 Jul 2026
- 2026D-Judge: Disrupting Multi-Turn Jailbreaks using Semantics-Preserving Output Rewriting31 May 2026
- 2026BAIT: Boundary-Guided Disclosure Escalation LLM Jailbreaking via Self-Conditioned Reasoning26 May 2026
- 2026Not All Turns Matter: Credit Assignment for Multi-Turn Jailbreaking9 May 2026
- 2026Mitigating Many-shot Jailbreak Attacks with One Single Demonstration8 May 2026
- 2026Recursive language models for jailbreak detection: a procedural defense for tool-augmented agents18 Feb 2026