The Continuation vs. Refusal Debate: Mechanism Analysis of Continuation-Triggered Jailbreaks in Large Language Models
Analyzing the attention head mechanism of continuation-triggered jailbreaks and proposing HCS
- arXiv
- 2603.08234
- Published
- Layer
- Model layer
- Setting
- Models and APIs
- Evaluated models
- LLaMA-2-7B-Chat, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
- DefensesInference-time intervention
- AttacksJailbreaks
- TechniqueConversation structure manipulation
AbstractThe authors state that jailbreaks arise from competition between two types of heads, and that HCS plus distillation can use this competition for inference-time intervention.
The authors use attention head mechanism analysis for continuation-triggered jailbreaks: under the same harmful instruction, moving the continuation suffix from after the instruction to outside the prompt boundary makes the model more likely to continue generating along the suffix.