Circuit Discovery Helps Detect LLM Jailbreaking: A Mechanistic Interpretability Study
A mechanistic analysis of the jailbreaking behavior in a large-scale, safety-aligned LLM, focusing on LLaMA-2-7B-chat-hf identifies computational circuits responsible for generating affirmative responses to jailbreak prompts and uncovers key attention heads and MLP pathways that mediate adversarial prompt exploitation.