GateBreaker: Gate-Guided Attacks on Mixture-of-Expert LLMs

TL;DR

GateBreaker is a novel, training-free attack framework that identifies and disables safety-related neurons in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs, significantly increasing their vulnerability to harmful outputs without extensive retraining.

Contribution

This paper introduces GateBreaker, the first architecture-agnostic, inference-time attack method targeting safety mechanisms in MoE LLMs, revealing their safety neurons and demonstrating transferability.

Findings

Disabling ~3% safety neurons raises attack success rate from 7.4% to 64.9%.

Safety neurons transfer across models within the same family, boosting transfer attack ASR to 67.7%.

GateBreaker achieves 60.9% ASR on unsafe image inputs in MoE vision-language models.

Abstract

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have advanced the scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a sparse subset of parameters per input, enabling state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational cost. As these models are increasingly deployed in critical domains, understanding and strengthening their alignment mechanisms is essential to prevent harmful outputs. However, existing LLM safety research has focused almost exclusively on dense architectures, leaving the unique safety properties of MoEs largely unexamined. The modular, sparsely-activated design of MoEs suggests that safety mechanisms may operate differently than in dense models, raising questions about their robustness. In this paper, we present GateBreaker, the first training-free, lightweight, and architecture-agnostic attack framework that compromises the safety alignment of modern MoE LLMs at inference time. GateBreaker operates in three stages: (i) gate-level profiling, which identifies safety experts disproportionately routed on harmful inputs, (ii) expert-level localization, which localizes the safety structure within safety experts, and (iii) targeted safety removal, which disables the identified safety structure to compromise the safety alignment. Our study shows that MoE safety concentrates within a small subset of neurons coordinated by sparse routing. Selective disabling of these neurons, approximately 3% of neurons in the targeted expert layers, significantly increases the averaged attack success rate (ASR) from 7.4% to 64.9% against the eight latest aligned MoE LLMs with limited utility degradation. These safety neurons transfer across models within the same family, raising ASR from 17.9% to 67.7% with one-shot transfer attack. Furthermore, GateBreaker generalizes to five MoE vision language models (VLMs) with 60.9% ASR on unsafe image inputs.