Steering Beyond the Support: Adversarial Training on Unsupervised Jailbroken Activation Simulation

May 23, 2026 ยท Grace Period ยท ๐Ÿ› ICML 2026

โณ Grace Period
This paper is less than 90 days old. We give authors time to release their code before passing judgment.
Authors Luoyu Chen, Weiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, Chenhan Zhang, Feng Wu, Jianhuan Huang, Ahmed Asiri, Shui Yu arXiv ID 2605.24535 Category cs.CR: Cryptography & Security Cross-listed cs.LG Citations 0 Venue ICML 2026
Abstract
Jailbreak prompts can trigger harmful completions on aligned LLMs, In accordance, safety steering has been proposed: test-time activation interventions that steer jailbreak activations to trigger refusal while preserving benign utility. However, existing steering methods are fundamentally supervised and tied to a static, limited training set, whereas real jailbreaks evolve and are often out-of-distributed from the training set, leading to failures on unseen attacks. In this paper, we tackle the failure on unseen jailbreaks problem, base on unsupervised latent direction discovery. We propose a bi-level adversarial training framework for zero-shot jailbreak defense. In the inner step, we simulate diverse jail-broken activations by extrapolating from refusal-state harmful-request activations via unsupervised latent direction discovery, which expands the coverage of real jailbreak activation subspaces. In the outer step, we train a potential-induced steering field to push these adversarial jailbroken states into refusal regions while keeping benign unchanged. Across three LLMs and six classical jailbreak families, our method achieves strong defense with attack success rates mostly below 5%, and rising subspace coverage throughout training helps explain the improved generalization.
Community shame:
Not yet rated
Community Contributions

Found the code? Know the venue? Think something is wrong? Let us know!

๐Ÿ“œ Similar Papers

In the same crypt โ€” Cryptography & Security