Jailbreak Distillation: Renewable Safety Benchmarking

Jingyu Zhang, Ahmed Elgohary, Xiawei Wang, A S M Iftekhar, Ahmed Magooda, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi, Kyle Jackson

Keywords: safety benchmarking, safety evaluation, red teaming

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed in critical applications, raising urgent needs for robust safety benchmarking. We propose Jailbreak Distillation (JBDistill), a novel benchmark construction framework that "distills" jailbreak attacks into high-quality and easily-updatable safety benchmarks. JBDistill utilizes a small set of development models and existing jailbreak attack algorithms to create a candidate prompt pool, then employs prompt selection algorithms to identify an effective subset of prompts as safety benchmarks. JBDistill addresses challenges in existing safety evaluation: the use of consistent evaluation prompts across models ensures fair comparisons and reproducibility. It requires minimal human effort to rerun the JBDistill pipeline and produce updated benchmarks, alleviating concerns on saturation and contamination. Extensive experiments demonstrate our benchmarks generalize robustly to 13 diverse models held out from benchmark construction, significantly outperforming existing safety benchmarks. Our framework thus provides an effective, sustainable, and adaptable solution for streamlining safety evaluation.

Submission Number: 40