SpatialJB: How Text Distribution Art Becomes The "Jailbreak Key" for LLM Guardrails

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which pose significant risks to their secure deployment. Current safetymechanisms primarily rely on output guardrails to filter harmful outputs, yet these defenses are not impenetrable. Due to LLMs' inherent reliance on autoregressive, token-by-token inference, their semantic representations lack robustness to spatially structured perturbations, such as redistributing tokens across different rows, columns, or diagonals. Exploiting the Transformer's spatial weakness, we propose SpatialJB to disrupt the model's output generation process, allowing harmful content to bypass guardrails without detection. Comprehensive experiments conducted on leading LLMs get nearly 100% ASR, demonstrating the high effectiveness of SpatialJB. Even after adding advanced output guardrails, like the OpenAI Moderation API, SpatialJB consistently maintains a success rate exceeding 75%, outperforming current jailbreak techniques by a significant margin. The proposal of SpatialJB exposes a key weak- ness in current guardrails and emphasizes the importance of spatial semantics, offering new insights to advance LLM safety research. To prevent potential misuse, we also present baseline defense strategies against SpatialJB and evaluate their effectiveness inmitigating such attacks.