Augmented Adversarial Trigger Learning

Zhe Wang, Yanjun Qi


Abstract
Gradient optimization-based adversarial attack methods automate the learning of adversarial triggers to generate jailbreak prompts or leak system prompts. In this work, we take a closer look at the optimization objective of adversarial trigger learning and propose ATLA: Adversarial Trigger Learning with Augmented objectives. ATLA improves the negative log-likelihood loss used by previous studies into a weighted loss formulation that encourages the learned adversarial triggers to optimize more towards response format tokens. This enables ATLA to learn an adversarial trigger from just one query-response pair and the learned trigger generalizes well to other similar queries. We further design a variation to augment trigger optimization with an auxiliary loss that suppresses evasive responses. We showcase how to use ATLA to learn adversarial suffixes jailbreaking LLMs and to extract hidden system prompts. Empirically we demonstrate that ATLA consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques, achieving nearly 100% success in attacking while requiring 80% fewer queries. ATLA learned jailbreak suffixes demonstrate high generalization to unseen queries and transfer well to new LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.394
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7068–7100
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.394/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhe Wang and Yanjun Qi. 2025. Augmented Adversarial Trigger Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 7068–7100, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Augmented Adversarial Trigger Learning (Wang & Qi, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.394.pdf