English

Adaptive Probe-based Steering for Robust LLM Jailbreaking

Cryptography and Security 2026-05-21 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of contrastive steering for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on limited and inherently biased contrastive prompts and require laborious manual tuning of steering strength, limiting their robustness and effectiveness. In this paper, we leverage the idea of model extraction to guide the learned steering vectors to approximate the ideal one and propose tuning the steering strength adaptively based on contrastive activations' statistics. Experiments demonstrate that our method notably improves the effectiveness and robustness of probe-based steering, without any extra contrastive prompts or laborious manual tuning. Being an attack paper, this paper focuses on revealing the breakdown of fortified LLMs, raising the average harmfulness score from 6\% to 70\%. Our code is available at https://github.com/fhdnskfbeuv/adaptiveSteering.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.20286,
  title  = {Adaptive Probe-based Steering for Robust LLM Jailbreaking},
  author = {Junxi Chen and Junhao Dong and Xiaohua Xie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.20286},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 13 figures, accepted by ICML 2026