Reactivating Alignment: Defending LLMs from Jailbreaks via Intention-Aware Input-Output Matching

Summary

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that conceal harmful intent within complex adversarial prompts. Existing defenses primarily rely on input perturbation or harmful-output suppression, but they rarely model where malicious intent resides, resulting in brittle protection and excessive over-refusal. We propose SENTINEL, a plug-and-play, generation-time jailbreak defense that reframes mitigation as an intent extraction problem. Our key insight is that instruction-tuned LLMs exhibit strong input--output semantic consistency: regardless of jailbreak complexity, generated outputs tend to align with the attacker's true intent. SENTINEL exploits this property by matching semantically aligned input--output regions to extract intention-revealing subsequences, scores these subsequences using refusal-direction projections to estimate harmfulness, and halts generation when necessary. Experiments on HarmBench across multiple LLMs show that SENTINEL reduces jailbreak success rates to close to 5\% while maintaining low over-refusal. We further demonstrate robustness to adaptive attacks and provide a mechanistic interpretation: SENTINEL re-distributes jailbreak features from alignment blind spots to aligned regions.