NonTextual Target Attack

Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically optimize adversarial suffixes to align the LLM output with predefined target responses.

However, restricting the objective as inducing fixed targets inherently constrains the adversarial search space, limiting the overall attack efficacy.

Furthermore, existing methods typically require numerous optimization iterations to fulfill the large gap between the fixed target and the original LLM output, resulting in low attack efficiency.

To overcome these limitations, we propose NonTextual Target Attack (NTA), the first gradient-based attack that relies on a non-textual constrained objective to maximize the unsafety probability of the LLM output, without enforcing any response patterns.

For tractable optimization, we further decompose this objective into two constrained sub-objectives, which can be approximated by two differentiable unconstrained losses, to iteratively optimize the response and the adversarial prompt in the neighborhood of the original prompt, with a theoretical analysis to validate the decomposition.

In contrast to existing attacks, NTA first realizes gradient-based prompt optimization on a non-textual target and significantly expands the attack space, enabling more flexible and efficient exploration of LLM vulnerabilities.

Extensive evaluations show that \textsc{NTA} achieves an average attack success rate of 96.8\% against recent safety-aligned LLMs with only 100 optimization iterations on AdvBench, outperforming state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks by over 40\%.