Papers › Prefix Guidance: A Steering Wheel for Large Language Models to Defend Against Jailbreak Attacks
Prefix Guidance: A Steering Wheel for Large Language Models to Defend Against Jailbreak Attacks
Jiawei Zhao, Kejiang Chen, Xiaojian Yuan, Weiming Zhang
In recent years, the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, research indicates that LLMs are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries can induce the generation of harmful content through meticulously crafted prompts. This vulnerability poses significant challenges to the secure use and promotion of LLMs. Existing defense methods offer protection from different perspectives but often suffer from insufficient effectiveness or a significant impact on the model's capabilities. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play and easy-to-deploy jailbreak defense framework, namely Prefix Guidance (PG), which guides the model to identify harmful prompts by directly setting the first few tokens of the model's output. This approach combines the model's inherent security capabilities with an external classifier to defend against jailbreak attacks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PG across three models and five attack methods. Compared to baselines, our approach is generally more effective on average. Additionally, results on the Just-Eval benchmark further confirm PG's superiority to preserve the model's performance. our code is available at https://github.com/weiyezhimeng/Prefix-Guidance.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections