ASTRA: An Automated Framework for Strategy Discovery, Retrieval, and Evolution for Jailbreaking LLMs

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Authors: Xu Liu, Yan Chen, Kan Ling, Yichi Zhu, Hengrun Zhang, Guisheng Fan, Huiqun Yu
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Despite extensive safety alignment, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks.However, existing methods generally lack the capability for continuous learning and self-evolution from interactions, limiting the diversity and adaptability of attack strategies.To address this, we propose ASTRA, an automated framework capable of autonomously discovering, retrieving, and evolving attack strategies.ASTRA operates on a closed-loop "attack-evaluate-distillreuse" mechanism, which not only generates attack prompts but also automatically distills reusable strategies from every interaction.To systematically manage these strategies, we introduce a dynamic three-tier strategy library (Effective, Promising, and Ineffective) that categorizes strategies based on performance.This hierarchical memory mechanism enables the framework to enhance efficiency by leveraging successful patterns while optimizing the exploration space by avoiding known failures.Extensive experiments in a black-box setting demonstrate that ASTRA significantly outperforms existing baselines.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Web Application Security Vulnerabilities Information and Cyber Security Advanced Malware Detection Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
39691–39710
Publication date
1 January 2026