English

Jailbreak susceptibility prediction and mitigation via the behavioral geometry of models

Cryptography and Security 2026-05-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Evaluating and mitigating a generative system's susceptibility to jailbreak attacks is critical to its safe deployment. Given the number of deployable systems, full per-configuration evaluation and optimization is impractical. In this paper, we formalize the behavioral geometry of a population of models that, by leveraging previously evaluated and defended models, supports both efficient susceptibility prediction and effective defense transfer across a population. We apply the framework to 79 models spanning 24 providers and to 100 system configurations of a single base model. Simple methods that use the behavioral geometry reach an AUPRC of 0.940.94 for susceptibility detection with 98%\approx98\% fewer probes relative to a full evaluation. Using the behavioral geometry to select which model to transfer an optimized defense from outperforms same-provider assignment (+2%+2\%, p=0.03p = 0.03) at no additional probe cost, with a set of three models sufficient to cover the population. Results are robust to hyperparameter selection and judge.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26409,
  title  = {Jailbreak susceptibility prediction and mitigation via the behavioral geometry of models},
  author = {Hayden Helm and Xiaodong Liu and Weiwei Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26409},
  year   = {2026}
}