Why Not Act on What You Know? Unleashing Safety Potential of LLMs via Self-Aware Guard Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper introduces SAGE, a training-free method that significantly improves the safety of large language models by aligning their safety detection and response generation, effectively defending against complex jailbreak attacks.

Contribution

We propose SAGE, a novel, training-free safety enhancement strategy that improves LLMs' ability to generate safe responses while maintaining their helpfulness.

Findings

Achieves 99% success rate against jailbreak attacks

Enhances safety without compromising model helpfulness

Demonstrates robustness across various LLM architectures

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks but remain vulnerable to meticulously crafted jailbreak attacks. In this paper, we identify a critical safety gap: while LLMs are adept at detecting jailbreak prompts, they often produce unsafe responses when directly processing these inputs. Inspired by this insight, we propose SAGE (Self-Aware Guard Enhancement), a training-free defense strategy designed to align LLMs' strong safety discrimination performance with their relatively weaker safety generation ability. SAGE consists of two core components: a Discriminative Analysis Module and a Discriminative Response Module, enhancing resilience against sophisticated jailbreak attempts through flexible safety discrimination instructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate SAGE's effectiveness and robustness across various open-source and closed-source LLMs of different sizes and architectures, achieving an average 99% defense success rate against numerous complex and covert jailbreak methods while maintaining helpfulness on general benchmarks. We further conduct mechanistic interpretability analysis through hidden states and attention distributions, revealing the underlying mechanisms of this detection-generation discrepancy. Our work thus contributes to developing future LLMs with coherent safety awareness and generation behavior. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/SAGE.