Study suggests dialects do not drive jailbreak success

The main finding is that dialectal surface form is neither necessary nor sufficient for high attack success. Non‑optimized English, Mandarin, and naive dialect translations remain below 8 % attack success, whereas all conditions that retain an optimizer‑controlled strategy bank reach 98–100 %. A culture‑neutral generic strategy bank achieves the same ceiling at near‑single‑query cost, indicating that strategy‑bank expressiveness, rather than dialectal or cultural content, drives the effect. Dialect choice still influences query efficiency and response severity, and qualitative coding reveals mechanisms such as semantic glossing and procedural scaffolding.

The authors note that the absolute ceiling‑level attack success rate is sensitive to judge calibration and that the design does not fully separate one‑shot strategy construction from iterative search, highlighting limitations for future work on LLM safety.