AnchorRep：用表征排斥防御 LLM 跨模型对抗迁移攻击

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Abstract:Adversarial attacks optimized on a single open-weight LLM can transfer to and jailbreak architecturally different models, allowing an attacker with white-box access to one model to compromise independently deployed systems. This creates a shared vulnerability across models, yet existing defenses are not designed for this cross-model threat. We find that cross-model transfer aligns with shared internal representation geometry, making it a natural defense target. AnchorRep targets this geometry directly with a lightweight LoRA adapter that pushes the defended model's internal representations of harmful prompts away from those of a frozen anchor model on the same prompts. Training uses a small set of harmful prompts and no adversarial examples. Across five models and four architectural families, AnchorRep reduces cross-model attack success rate to <=1.1% on 2,000 transferred attacks (0% on two), including the largest drop on Mistral (36% -> 1.1%). Existing defenses can reduce transfer, but only at high cost either inducing up to 77% degenerate benign output or increasing over-refusal by up to 18%. Because such degenerate benign outputs are not captured by standard refusal-based metrics, we introduce the Benign Garble Rate to quantify them. Our results suggest that cross-model robustness can be achieved by shaping representation geometry, without requiring attack-specific training

Submission history

From: Gal Wertheizer [view email]
[v1] Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:19:52 UTC (142 KB)
[v2] Wed, 4 Nov 2026 16:58:49 UTC (146 KB)