One Word at a Time: Incremental Completion Decomposition Breaks LLM Safety
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in conversational safety mechanisms. We introduce Incremental Completion Decomposition ICD, a trajectory-based jailbreak strategy that elicits a sequence of single-word continuations related to a malicious request before eliciting the full response. In addition, we propose ICD variants that use model-generated or attacker-injected intermediate continuations, as well as final-response prefilling. We evaluate these variants across a broad set of open-weight model families, demonstrating superior Attack Success Rate (ASR) on AdvBench, JailbreakBench, an...
| Authors | Samee Arif, Naihao Deng, Zhijing Jin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 August 2026 |
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