HarDBench: A Benchmark for Draft-Based Co-Authoring Jailbreak Attacks for Safe Human-LLM Collaborative Writing
For developers and users of LLMs in collaborative writing, this work highlights a new safety vulnerability and provides a benchmark and mitigation method.
The paper identifies that LLMs used in draft-based co-authoring are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks where malicious users fill incomplete drafts with dangerous content. It introduces HarDBench, a benchmark for evaluating this threat, and proposes a safety-utility balanced alignment method that reduces harmful outputs without degrading co-authoring performance.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as co-authors in collaborative writing, where users begin with rough drafts and rely on LLMs to complete, revise, and refine their content. However, this capability poses a serious safety risk: malicious users could jailbreak the models-filling incomplete drafts with dangerous content-to force them into generating harmful outputs. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability of current LLMs to such draft-based co-authoring jailbreak attacks and introduce HarDBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of LLMs against this emerging threat. HarDBench spans a range of high-risk domains-including Explosives, Drugs, Weapons, and Cyberattacks-and features prompts with realistic structure and domain-specific cues to assess the model susceptibility to harmful completions. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a safety-utility balanced alignment approach based on preference optimization, training models to refuse harmful completions while remaining helpful on benign drafts. Experimental results show that existing LLMs are highly vulnerable in co-authoring contexts and our alignment method significantly reduces harmful outputs without degrading performance on co-authoring capabilities. This presents a new paradigm for evaluating and aligning LLMs in human-LLM collaborative writing settings. Our new benchmark and dataset are available on our project page at https://github.com/untae0122/HarDBench