What Drives Dialectal Jailbreaks? An Ablation of Surface Form, Cultural Framing, and Strategy Banks
Recent work suggests that obscure language registers can weaken large language model refusal behavior, especially when paired with black-box prompt optimization. It remains unclear whether failures stem from non-standard surface form, culturally grounded framing, or optimization over an expressive prompt-strategy space. We study Chinese registers by extending a classical-Chinese red-teaming framework to Shanghainese and Cantonese and running a 36-cell ablation across surface forms, strategy-bank variants, and two target models. The main finding is corrective: dialectal surface form is neither necessary nor sufficient for high attack success. Non-optimized English, Mandarin, and naive dial...
| Authors | Qingyang Xu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 September 2026 |
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