Depth, Not Breadth: Best-of-N Jailbreaking Beyond Surface Noise
Best-of-N jailbreaking spends a query budget on surface variation, scrambling and recasing a request until one draw lands. We ask what the same search buys when it wraps a structural encoding instead. Against SAGE, a published self-check defense, best-of-N over a code-completion encoding reaches 67, 22 and 15% of behaviors on three open-weight targets, where that encoding fired once reaches at most 4.7% and the published character search at full budget at most 3.0%: 9 to 68 times the sum of the parts, with bootstrap intervals clearing both ingredients on every target. We report the operative figure beside the headline rather than the headline alone: at the actionable severity threshold th...
| Authors | Haoyu Zhang, Hanwen Liu, Yang Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.