JPU: Bridging Jailbreak Defense and Unlearning via On-Policy Path Rectification
Xi Wang, Songlei Jian National University of Defense Technology, Shasha Li National University of Defense Technology, Xiaopeng Li National University of Defense Technology, Zhaoye Li, Bin Ji National University of Defense Technology, Baosheng Wang, Jie Yu
Despite extensive safety alignment, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail against jailbreak attacks. While machine unlearning has emerged as a promising defense by erasing specific harmful parameters, current methods remain vulnerable to diverse jailbreaks. We first conduct an empirical study and discover that this failure mechanism is caused by jailbreaks primarily activating non-erased parameters in the intermediate layers. Further, by probing the underlying mechanism through which these circumvented parameters reassemble into the prohibited output, we verify the persistent existence of dynamic jailbreak paths and show that the inability to rectify them constitutes the fundamental gap in existing unlearning defenses. To bridge this gap, we propose Jailbreak Path Unlearning (JPU), which is the first to rectify dynamic jailbreak paths towards safety anchors by dynamically mining on-policy adversarial samples to expose vulnerabilities and identify jailbreak paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JPU significantly enhances jailbreak resistance against dynamic attacks while preserving the model’s utility.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表