Beyond Explicit Refusals: Soft-Failure Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Existing jamming attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically induce explicit refusals or denial-of-service behaviors, which are conspicuous and easy to detect. In this work, we formalize a subtler availability threat, termed soft failure, which degrades system utility by inducing fluent and coherent yet non-informative responses rather than overt failures. We propose Deceptive Evolutionary Jamming Attack (DEJA), an automated black-box attack framework that generates adversarial documents to trigger such soft failures by exploiting safety-aligned behaviors of large language models. DEJA employs an evolutionary optimization process guided by a fine-grained Answer Utili...
| Authors | Wentao Zhang, Yan Zhuang, ZhuHang Zheng et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 April 2026 |
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