JailbreakOPT: Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization with Macro-Action

arXiv:2606.11425v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target-model responses. We propose JailbreakOPT, a method that maintains a library of reusable prompt transformations (actions) and composes them into macro-actions for within-episode search, generating standalone attack prompts. To reuse experience across episodes, JailbreakOPT learns an action-selection policy using contextual Thompson sampling and outcomes from prior search paths. Experiments across multiple LLMs and benchmarks show that JailbreakOPT improves attack success rate (ASR) over single-action and iterative baselines. More broadly, exploration and exploitation over human-designed attack strategies can help probe residual vulnerabilities and identify failure patterns that may inform defenses aimed at broader classes of attacks.