Break the Breakout: Reinventing LM Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks with Self-Refine

AbstractLanguage models (LMs) are vulnerable to exploitation for adversarial misuse. Training LMs for safety alignment is extensive, making it hard to respond to fast-developing attacks immediately, such as jailbreaks. We propose self-refine with formatting that achieves outstanding safety even in non-safety-aligned LMsand evaluate our method alongside several defense baselines, demonstrating that it is the safest training-free method against jailbreak attacks.Additionally, we proposed a formatting method that improves the efficiency of the self-refine process while reducing attack success rates in fewer iterations. We observed that non-safety-aligned LMs outperform safety-aligned LMs in safety tasks by giving more helpful and safe responses.In conclusion, our findings can achieve less safety risk with fewer computational costs, allowing non-safety LM to be efficiently utilized in real-world service.