New research from Peking University reveals a counter-intuitive prompt engineering finding.
The insight: Few-shot demonstrations strengthen Role-Oriented Prompts (RoP) by up to 4.5% for jailbreak defense. Same technique degrades Task-Oriented Prompts (ToP) by 21.2%.
The mechanism: Role prompts establish identity. Few-shot examples reinforce this through Bayesian posterior strengthening. Task prompts rely on instruction parsing. Few-shot examples dilute attention, creating vulnerability.
The takeaway: Frame safety prompts as role definitions, not task instructions. Add 2-3 few-shot safety demonstrations. Avoid few-shots with task-oriented safety prompts.
Tested across Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek, and Pangu models on AdvBench, HarmBench, and SG-Bench.
Paper: arXiv:2602.04294v1
#LLMSecurity #PromptEngineering #AIAlignment #JailbreakDefense #FewShotLearning #SystemPrompts #MachineLearning #AIResearch #Aunova
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