@inproceedings{han-etal-2026-dictionary,
    title = "Dictionary Guided Sparse Logit Editing for Reliable Jailbreak Attacks",
    author = "Han, Shuaibiao  and
      Ni, Ruiyang  and
      Yi, Zhiyu  and
      Li, Changlong  and
      Xu, Perley  and
      Ruan, Wenjie",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.findings-acl.2137/",
    pages = "43089--43107",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Although Large Language Models undergo rigorous safety alignment, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing methods, particularly gradient-based prompt optimization, suffer from high computational costs and produce uninterpretable, high-perplexity inputs. While recent logit-space attacks improve efficiency, they often rely on cumbersome auxiliary models or complex pipelines. In this work, we propose Sparse Index-Based Intervention (SIBI), a white-box, inference-time jailbreak that bypasses guardrails via lightweight, sparse logit editing. SIBI operates without gradients or auxiliary models, modifying pre-softmax logits using a compact, tokenizer-aligned dictionary of penalty and reward tokens. By incorporating temperature-consistent scaling and a mixed-norm trust region, the method ensures attack effectiveness while preserving generation fluency. On standard benchmarks, SIBI achieves high attack success rates while reducing computational overhead and space overhead compared to optimization baselines."
}