GPT-4 Jailbreaks Itself with Near-Perfect Success Using Self-Explanation

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Abstract:Research on jailbreaking has been valuable for testing and understanding the safety and security issues of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce Iterative Refinement Induced Self-Jailbreak (IRIS), a novel approach that leverages the reflective capabilities of LLMs for jailbreaking with only black-box access. Unlike previous methods, IRIS simplifies the jailbreaking process by using a single model as both the attacker and target. This method first iteratively refines adversarial prompts through self-explanation, which is crucial for ensuring that even well-aligned LLMs obey adversarial instructions. IRIS then rates and enhances the output given the refined prompt to increase its harmfulness. We find that IRIS achieves jailbreak success rates of 98% on GPT-4, 92% on GPT-4 Turbo, and 94% on Llama-3.1-70B in under 7 queries. It significantly outperforms prior approaches in automatic, black-box, and interpretable jailbreaking, while requiring substantially fewer queries, thereby establishing a new standard for interpretable jailbreaking methods.