SEMA-Auto: Sighted and Efficient Multi-Turn Attack with Autonomy
Organizations: University of Rochester · Microsoft Research
Abstract
Existing jailbreak attackers fall into two classes: static planners fix their single- or multi-turn adversarial plans in advance, remaining simple but losing sight of the victim's replies, wasting turns and limiting transferability; interactive generators read each victim reply to generate the next-turn attack but require in-loop evaluators for success signals or hints, incurring substantial costs and inflated performance. Bridging this gap, we propose SEMA-Auto, a sighted and efficient multi-turn attacker with autonomy, interacting with the victim model and terminating the session by itself upon success. To stabilize its behaviors and boost its capabilities, SEMA-Auto is trained in two stages. Synthetic bootstrap tuning installs the notion of attack targets and conforming decisions by fine-tuning the base model with bootstrapped trajectories. Decision-supervised reinforcement learning then optimizes two objectives jointly yet separately, reinforcing the attack with higher jailbreak reward while supervising the decision at each turn against an absolute target. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) attack success rates (ASR) across multiple datasets, victims, and judges, outperforming all static and interactive baselines, within almost the fewest turns, demonstrating both effectiveness and efficiency. For example, SEMA-Auto performs a ASR@1 within an average of turns against DeepSeek-V4-Flash on AdvBench, while the best static baseline is with fixed turns and the best interactive baseline is in turns. Against safety-hardened frontier models, GPT-oss-120B, GPT-5.4, Claude-Haiku-4.5, and GPT-6-Astra, our counter-trained attacker achieves an average ASR@1 on HarmBench, over prior SOTA. Our code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/SEMA
Figures & tables
| In-distribution: AdvBench ( Zou et al., 2023 ) | Out-of-distribution: HarmBench ( Mazeika et al., 2024 ) | |||||||||
| Attackers / Victim models | Qwen2.5 -3B-Instruct | Llama-3.1 -8B-Instruct | GPT-4.1 -mini | GPT-4o | DeepSeek -V4-Flash | Qwen2.5 -3B-Instruct | Llama-3.1 -8B-Instruct | GPT-4.1 -mini | GPT-4o | DeepSeek -V4-Flash |
| Static Baselines | ||||||||||
| FlipAttack ( Liu et al., 2024b ) | 1.7 | 1.0 | 28.7 | 20.0 | 30.4 | 0.0 | 1.3 | 44.0 | 35.2 | 47.8 |
| Jailbreak-R1 ( Guo et al., 2025 ) | 20.4 | 15.8 | 14.6 | 12.1 | 8.7 | 29.6 | 21.4 | 15.1 | 10.7 | 9.4 |
| Jigsaw Puzzle ( Yang et al., 2024a ) | 21.9 | 35.2 | 57.3 | 1.2 | 47.9 | 17.6 | 32.7 | 61.6 | 1.3 | 53.5 |
| ActorAttack ( Ren et al., 2025 ) | 8.4 | 9.4 | 13.3 | 8.4 | 11.2 | 7.7 | 9.6 | 11.5 | 9.0 | 11.5 |
| AdvBench ( Zou et al., 2023 ) | HarmBench ( Mazeika et al., 2024 ) | |||||||
| Attackers / Victim models | GPT-oss-120B | GPT-5.4 | Claude-Haiku-4.5 | GPT-6-Astra | GPT-oss-120B | GPT-5.4 | Claude-Haiku-4.5 | GPT-6-Astra |
| Training-free Methods | ||||||||
| FlipAttack ( Liu et al., 2024b ) | 0.6 | 0.0 | 0.2 | 2.5 | 8.8 | 0.0 | 0.6 | 1.3 |
| Jigsaw Puzzle ( Yang et al., 2024a ) | 0.4 | 0.2 | 0.0 | 1.5 | 2.5 | 0.6 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| ActorAttack ( Ren et al., 2025 ) | 5.3 | 1.6 | 4.3 | 0.4 | 22.4 | 1.3 | 3.8 | 0.6 |
| Crescendo ( Russinovich et al., 2025 ) | 23.8 | 8.3 | 8.7 | 3.3 | 47.2 | 9.4 | 14.5 | 3.8 |
| Attackers / Victim models | Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct | Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | GPT-4.1-mini | GPT-4o | DeepSeek-V4-Flash | Average |
| Static Baselines | ||||||
| Jigsaw Puzzle ( Yang et al., 2024a ) | 30.2 | 35.2 | 28.9 | 0.0 | 71.1 | 33.1 |
| ActorAttack ( Ren et al., 2025 ) | 12.8 | 17.9 | 19.9 | 14.1 | 19.9 | 16.9 |
| SEMA ( Feng et al., 2026a ) | 87.4 | 92.5 | 93.1 | 78.0 | 67.9 | 83.8 |
| Interactive Baselines | ||||||
| Crescendo ( Russinovich et al., 2025 ) | 54.7 | 56.6 | 44.0 | 49.1 | 35.2 | 47.9 |
Appendix figures & tables16 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Symbol | Meaning |
| Dataset over harmful queries. | |
| A single harmful query (intent) provided to the attacker. | |
| Attacker model, victim model, and jailbreak judge, respectively. | |
| Stochastic policies for attacker and victim. | |
| Trainable parameters of the attacker, and the attacker carrying them. | |
| Number of (adversarial) turns for a multi-turn attack attempt. |
| Static Baselines | Interactive Baselines | SEMA-Auto (Ours) | |||||||||||||||
| Dataset | Victim | Judge | FlipAttack | Jailbreak-R1 | Jigsaw Puzzle | ActorAttack | SEMA | Crescendo | GOAT | FITD | CoA | X-Teaming | TROJail | TRACE | l3@l8 | q7@l8 | q14@l8 |
| AdvBench | Qwen2.5-3B | Qwen3 Guard | 58.8 | 61.5 | 87.9 | 66.7 | 99.6 | 92.1 | 66.2 | 27.1 | 56.3 | 94.8 | 86.5 | 98.5 | 98.8 | 99.6 | 100.0 |
| LLM Clf. | 1.7 | 20.4 | 21.9 | 8.4 | 79.6 | 32.3 | 27.1 | 17.3 | 25.4 | 51.3 | 50.4 | 76.3 | 82.7 | 87.1 | 90.0 | ||
| HarmB. Clf. | 0.0 | 21.9 | 31.9 | 16.8 | 87.1 | 41.7 | 26.9 | 22.1 | 36.3 | 61.2 | 77.5 | 97.7 | 93.7 | 95.6 | 93.5 | ||
| Llama-3.1-8B | Qwen3 Guard | 75.6 | 42.7 | 82.1 | 65.4 | 96.9 | 91.3 | 20.2 | 69.2 | 44.2 | 78.8 | 74.8 | 89.6 | 98.7 | 95.6 | 99.2 | |
| LLM Clf. | 1.0 | 15.8 | 35.2 | 9.4 | 79.0 | 33.8 | 4.4 | 42.9 | 15.6 | 46.5 | 33.7 | 62.9 | 73.7 | 77.5 | 79.2 | ||
| Attacker | l3@l8 | q7@l8 | q14@l8 | |||||||||
| Judge | LLM Classifier | HarmBench Classifier | LLM Classifier | HarmBench Classifier | LLM Classifier | HarmBench Classifier | ||||||
| Victim / Subset | Train | Held-out | Train | Held-out | Train | Held-out | Train | Held-out | Train | Held-out | Train | Held-out |
| Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct | 82.5 | 83.7 | 93.3 | 95.2 | 87.5 | 85.6 | 95.0 | 98.1 | 91.8 | 82.7 | 93.8 | 92.3 |
| Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | 73.3 | 75.0 | 86.8 | 91.3 | 76.7 | 80.8 | 87.0 | 94.2 | 81.7 | 69.2 | 86.5 | 84.6 |
| GPT-4.1-mini | 81.0 | 80.8 | 91.3 | 90.4 | 89.9 | 86.5 | 95.9 | 96.2 | 93.5 | 91.3 | 94.5 | 95.2 |
| GPT-4o | 79.8 | 71.2 | 87.0 | 80.8 | 82.7 | 84.6 | 91.8 | 93.3 | 87.0 | 85.6 | 88.5 | 88.5 |
| Static Baselines | Interactive Baselines | SEMA-Auto (Ours) | ||||||||||||
| In-loop evaluator | ✗ | ✗ | ✔ | ✗ | ||||||||||
| Dataset | Victim | Jigsaw Puzzle | ActorAttack | SEMA | GOAT | FITD | Crescendo | CoA † | X-Teaming | TROJail | TRACE | l3@l8 | q7@l8 | q14@l8 |
| AdvBench | Qwen2.5-3B | 10.4 | 5.0 | 7.0 | 10.0 | 8.8 | 5.0 | 3.0 | 2.4 | 4.6 | 2.0 | 2.5 | 2.5 | 2.6 |
| Llama-3.1-8B | 10.4 | 5.0 | 7.0 | 10.0 | 9.7 | 5.2 | 2.5 | 3.4 | 6.3 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 3.0 | 2.7 | |
| GPT-4.1-mini | 10.4 | 5.0 | 7.0 | 10.0 | 9.6 | 4.7 | 2.6 | 2.6 | 8.8 | 3.2 | 2.7 | 2.5 | 2.5 | |
| GPT-4o | 10.4 | 5.0 | 7.0 | 10.0 | 9.9 | 4.9 | 2.6 | 3.2 | 9.5 | 4.5 | 2.9 | 2.6 | 2.9 | |
| Training-free Methods | Counter-trained Learning-based Methods | ||||||||||||
| Dataset | Victim | Judge | FlipAttack | Jigsaw Puzzle | ActorAttack | Crescendo | GOAT | FITD | CoA | X-Teaming | SEMA | TRACE | SEMA-Auto (Ours) |
| AdvBench | GPT-oss-120B | LLM Clf. | 0.6 | 0.4 | 5.3 | 23.8 | 1.7 | 6.9 | 4.6 | 11.5 | 54.6 | 11.0 | 68.5 |
| HarmB. Clf. | 0.6 | 0.4 | 28.6 | 48.5 | 3.3 | 11.7 | 11.9 | 22.1 | 79.4 | 68.5 | 90.8 | ||
| GPT-5.4 | LLM Clf. | 0.0 | 0.2 | 1.6 | 8.3 | 0.4 | 4.6 | 0.4 | 1.7 | 70.6 | 8.1 | 76.9 | |
| HarmB. Clf. | 0.0 | 0.2 | 2.2 | 6.5 | 0.4 | 2.9 | 0.8 | 2.9 | 76.9 | 71.3 | 75.8 | ||
| Claude-Haiku-4.5 | LLM Clf. | 0.2 | 0.0 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 0.0 | 3.8 | 0.0 | 0.6 | 59.2 | 19.0 | 61.5 | |
| AdvBench | HarmBench | |||||||||||
| Victim models | GPT-oss-120B | GPT-5.4 | Claude-Haiku-4.5 | GPT-oss-120B | GPT-5.4 | Claude-Haiku-4.5 | ||||||
| Attackers / Judges | LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. | LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. | LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. | LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. | LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. | LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. |
| Jailbreak-R1 | 1.2 | 2.9 | 0.4 | 1.2 | 0.6 | 1.0 | 0.6 | 1.3 | 0.6 | 3.1 | 0.0 | 1.3 |
| SEMA | 8.5 | 11.3 | 9.0 | 15.4 | 2.1 | 2.7 | 3.1 | 7.5 | 4.4 | 5.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| TROJail | 0.6 | 2.9 | 0.6 | 3.5 | 0.2 | 1.0 | 1.3 | 5.7 | 2.5 | 3.8 | 1.3 | 1.9 |
| TRACE | 5.6 | 19.0 | 2.7 | 13.8 | 0.2 | 0.6 | 5.7 | 19.5 | 3.8 | 15.1 | 0.6 | 3.1 |
| Training-free Methods | Learning-based Methods | |||||||||||
| Dataset | Victim | Jigsaw Puzzle | ActorAttack | Crescendo | GOAT | FITD | CoA | X-Teaming | SEMA | TROJail | TRACE | SEMA-Auto (Ours) |
| AdvBench | Qwen2.5-3B | 0.809 | 0.414 | 0.423 | 0.367 | 0.271 | 0.586 | 0.342 | 0.218 | 0.269 | 0.322 | 0.362 |
| Llama-3.1-8B | 0.427 | 0.376 | 0.245 | 0.603 | 0.323 | 0.312 | 0.317 | 0.361 | ||||
| GPT-4.1-mini | 0.428 | 0.393 | 0.230 | 0.570 | 0.358 | 0.301 | 0.297 | 0.360 | ||||
| GPT-4o | 0.426 | 0.377 | 0.152 | 0.585 | 0.332 | 0.290 | 0.279 | 0.368 | ||||
| DeepSeek-V4-Flash | 0.433 | 0.423 | 0.164 | 0.610 | 0.350 | 0.380 | 0.270 | 0.359 | ||||
| Victim | Judge | SEMA | TRACE | SEMA-Auto (Ours) |
| GPT-oss-120B | LLM Clf. | 38.4 | 27.0 | 59.7 |
| HarmB. Clf. | 96.2 | 90.6 | 99.4 | |
| GPT-5.4 | LLM Clf. | 48.4 | 14.5 | 62.9 |
| HarmB. Clf. | 81.1 | 66.7 | 91.8 | |
| Claude-Haiku-4.5 | LLM Clf. | 40.9 | 25.2 | 58.5 |
| HarmB. Clf. | 88.7 | 54.7 | 95.6 |
| Static Baselines | Interactive Baselines | SEMA-Auto (Ours) | ||||||||||||
| Dataset | Victim | Jigsaw Puzzle | ActorAttack | SEMA | Crescendo | GOAT | FITD | CoA | X-Teaming | TROJail | TRACE | l3@l8 | q7@l8 | q14@l8 |
| AdvBench | Qwen2.5-3B | 30.2 | 13.7 | 93.3 | 33.7 | 61.2 | 41.5 | 26.8 | 53.2 | 54.0 | 77.7 | 88.5 | 89.2 | 93.3 |
| Llama-3.1-8B | 35.4 | 20.4 | 93.3 | 35.2 | 55.6 | 56.0 | 16.3 | 50.0 | 37.5 | 66.3 | 83.5 | 84.4 | 85.8 | |
| GPT-4.1-mini | 24.2 | 21.7 | 92.7 | 36.9 | 69.4 | 42.5 | 14.8 | 64.4 | 20.4 | 64.2 | 86.7 | 92.9 | 93.8 | |
| GPT-4o | 0.6 | 16.8 | 89.0 | 31.2 | 61.9 | 24.2 | 11.5 | 51.9 | 5.2 | 49.8 | 84.8 | 88.3 | 89.2 | |
| DeepSeek-V4-Flash | 76.2 | 25.6 | 74.8 | 30.4 | 54.0 | 25.4 | 10.6 | 48.3 | 9.0 | 25.6 | 67.9 | 80.0 | 73.3 | |
| Dataset | SEMA | SEMA-Auto | ||
| AdvBench | 82.2 | 88.6 | 85.1 | 87.0 |
| HarmBench | 75.3 | 83.8 | 86.2 | 88.8 |
| Attacker | Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct | Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct | Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct | |||
| Setting | AdvBench | HarmBench | AdvBench | HarmBench | AdvBench | HarmBench |
| Both stages (ours) | 78.8 | 78.3 | 84.2 | 86.0 | 87.3 | 87.7 |
| Bootstrap tuning only | 3.8 -75.0 | 6.4 -71.9 | 32.2 -52.0 | 38.5 -47.5 | 39.2 -48.1 | 44.8 -42.9 |
| Setting | AdvBench | HarmBench |
| Text markers (ours) | 78.8 | 78.3 |
| Added tokens | 72.3 -6.5 | 65.1 -13.2 |
| Multi-turn Attacks | Sighted to Victim Response | Learning without External Data | Turn-level Diversity | Adaptive Self-termination | |
| FlipAttack ( Liu et al., 2024b ) | ✗ | - | - | - | - |
| Jailbreak-R1 ( Guo et al., 2025 ) | ✗ | - | ✗ | - | - |
| Jigsaw Puzzle ( Yang et al., 2024a ) | ✔ | ✗ | - | ✔ | ✗ |
| ActorAttack ( Ren et al., 2025 ) | ✔ | ✗ | - | ✔ | ✗ |
| SEMA ( Feng et al., 2026a ) | ✔ | ✗ | ✔ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Crescendo ( Russinovich et al., 2025 ) | ✔ | ✔ | - | ✔ | ✗ |
| Attacker | Attacker LLM Size | In-loop Evaluator LLM Size | # Adversarial Turns | Total Runtime | # API Requests (#/attempt) |
| Static Attackers | |||||
| Jigsaw Puzzle ( Yang et al., 2024a ) | GPT-4o-mini | - | 10.9 | 5.5 min | |
| ActorAttack ( Ren et al., 2025 ) | GPT-4o | - | 5.0 | 1.1 h | |
| SEMA ( Feng et al., 2026a ) | 8B | - | 6.0 | 1.8 h | 0 |
| Interactive Attackers | |||||
| Crescendo ( Russinovich et al., 2025 ) | GPT-4o | GPT-4o | 5.7 | 2.1 h | |
| Attacker | AdvBench | HarmBench | ||
| LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. | LLM Clf. | HarmB. Clf. | |
| SEMA ( Feng et al., 2026a ) | 16.3 | 10.9 | 30.8 | 20.3 |
| FITD ( Weng et al., 2025 ) | 37.0 | 37.5 | 28.8 | 26.5 |
| TRACE ( He et al., 2026 ) | 7.5 | 3.9 | 8.4 | 6.1 |
| TROJail ( Xiong et al., 2026 ) | 25.1 | 10.0 | 13.1 | 10.0 |
| Crescendo ( Russinovich et al., 2025 ) | 6.0 | 7.6 | 6.1 | 10.7 |
| Attacker | In-loop evaluator | Stops at | Agreement |
| Crescendo ( Russinovich et al., 2025 ) | LLM Scorer (GPT-4o) | score | 82.8 |
| X-Teaming ( Rahman et al., 2025 ) | X-Teaming Judge (GPT-4o) | score , the top score | 92.0 |
Adversarial Attacks on LLMs
Adversarial attacks on large language models probe how crafted inputs, internal changes, and agent interactions bypass safety or disrupt reliable behavior.
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