Breadth Beats Depth: Improving GCG-Based Jailbreak Optimization with Breadth-Oriented Suffix Search

Abstract

Optimization-based jailbreak attacks such as Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) achieve strong effectiveness and transferability by optimizing adversarial suffixes on white-box source models. However, existing GCG-based methods rely on averaged adversarial loss and deep greedy search, which can over-emphasize easy-to-jailbreak behaviors and overlook promising regions of the suffix space. We propose BOSS, a plug-and-play framework that improves GCG-based jailbreak optimization through breadth-orien

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@misc{xiao2026breadth,
  title = {{Breadth Beats Depth: Improving GCG-Based Jailbreak Optimization with Breadth-Oriented Suffix Search}},
  author = {Shiliang Xiao and Jingsong Wei and Yuzhi Liang and Yufan Zheng and Xia Li and Qiliang Lin},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  eprint = {2609.02172},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02172}
}