Exploring the Vulnerability of the Content Moderation Guardrail in Large Language Models via Intent Manipulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18556v2
• Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:27:19 GMT
• Title: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Content Moderation Guardrail in Large Language Models via Intent Manipulation
• Authors: Jun Zhuang, Haibo Jin, Ye Zhang, Zhengjian Kang, Wenbin Zhang, Gaby G. Dagher, Haohan Wang,
• Abstract summary: We investigate the vulnerability of intent-aware guardrails and demonstrate that large language models exhibit implicit intent detection capabilities.<n>We propose a two-stage intent-based prompt-refinement framework, IntentPrompt, that first transforms harmful inquiries into structured outlines and further reframes them into declarative-style narratives.<n>Our framework consistently outperforms several cutting-edge jailbreak methods and evades even advanced Intent Analysis (IA) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based defenses.
• Score: 29.8288014123234
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Intent detection, a core component of natural language understanding, has considerably evolved as a crucial mechanism in safeguarding large language models (LLMs). While prior work has applied intent detection to enhance LLMs' moderation guardrails, showing a significant success against content-level jailbreaks, the robustness of these intent-aware guardrails under malicious manipulations remains under-explored. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of intent-aware guardrails and demonstrate that LLMs exhibit implicit intent detection capabilities. We propose a two-stage intent-based prompt-refinement framework, IntentPrompt, that first transforms harmful inquiries into structured outlines and further reframes them into declarative-style narratives by iteratively optimizing prompts via feedback loops to enhance jailbreak success for red-teaming purposes. Extensive experiments across four public benchmarks and various black-box LLMs indicate that our framework consistently outperforms several cutting-edge jailbreak methods and evades even advanced Intent Analysis (IA) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based defenses. Specifically, our "FSTR+SPIN" variant achieves attack success rates ranging from 88.25% to 96.54% against CoT-based defenses on the o1 model, and from 86.75% to 97.12% on the GPT-4o model under IA-based defenses. These findings highlight a critical weakness in LLMs' safety mechanisms and suggest that intent manipulation poses a growing challenge to content moderation guardrails.

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