An Empirical Measurement of Jailbreaking Evaluators (arxiv.org)
arXiv:2609.10594v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Expert evaluation of jailbreak responses is costly and difficult to scale, so the community increasingly relies on automated evaluators to determine whether an attack succeeds. However, jailbreak studies typically validate their chosen evaluator independently, repeatedly spending resources on similar evaluation efforts while making results across papers difficult to compare. Different evaluators also encode different definitions of jailbreak success, meaning that reported attack strength and apparent progress can depend substantially on which evaluator is used. We systematically compare six evaluators that recur in recent jailbreak attack and defense research: HarmBench, JailbreakBench, JailbreakRadar, StrongReject, JADES, and JailMeter. To our knowledge, no prior study has evaluated all six on the same human-labeled data under a controlled setup. We evaluate them on JailbreakQR and JailMeter-Eva, using human judgments as the reference, and measure agreement with humans, error types, and consistency across attack families. For evaluators that require a general-purpose LLM judge, we use a shared backbone to control for model-specific variation. We found that JADES exhibits the best overall performance, while HarmBench and StrongReject also demonstrate good performance.
Abstract: Expert evaluation of jailbreak responses is costly and difficult to scale, so the community increasingly relies on automated evaluators to determine whether an attack succeeds. However, jailbreak studies typically validate their chosen evaluator independently, repeatedly spending resources on similar evaluation efforts while making results across papers difficult to compare. Different evaluators also encode different definitions of jailbreak success, meaning that reported attack strength and apparent progress can depend substantially on which evaluator is used. We systematically compare six evaluators that recur in recent jailbreak attack and defense research: HarmBench, JailbreakBench, JailbreakRadar, StrongReject, JADES, and JailMeter. To our knowledge, no prior study has evaluated all six on the same human-labeled data under a controlled setup. We evaluate them on JailbreakQR and JailMeter-Eva, using human judgments as the reference, and measure agreement with humans, error types, and consistency across attack families. For evaluators that require a general-purpose LLM judge, we use a shared backbone to control for model-specific variation. We found that JADES exhibits the best overall performance, while HarmBench and StrongReject also demonstrate good performance.
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