Paper Detail

One Turn Too Late: Response-Aware Defense Against Hidden Malicious Intent in Multi-Turn Dialogue

Xinjie Shen, Rongzhe Wei, Peizhi Niu, Haoyu Wang, Ruihan Wu, Eli Chien, Bo Li, Pin-Yu Chen, Pan Li

huggingface Score 10.5

Published 2026-05-12 · First seen 2026-05-13

General AI

Abstract

Hidden malicious intent in multi-turn dialogue poses a growing threat to deployed large language models (LLMs). Rather than exposing a harmful objective in a single prompt, increasingly capable attackers can distribute their intent across multiple benign-looking turns. Recent studies show that even modern commercial models with advanced guardrails remain vulnerable to such attacks despite advances in safety alignment and external guardrails. In this work, we address this challenge by detecting the earliest turn at which delivering the candidate response would make the accumulated interaction sufficient to enable harmful action. This objective requires precise turn-level intervention that identifies the harm-enabling closure point while avoiding premature refusal of benign exploratory conversations. To further support training and evaluation, we construct the Multi-Turn Intent Dataset (MTID), which contains branching attack rollouts, matched benign hard negatives, and annotations of the earliest harm-enabling turns. We show that MTID helps enable a turn-level monitor TurnGate, which substantially outperforms existing baselines in harmful-intent detection while maintaining low over-refusal rates. TurnGate further generalizes across domains, attacker pipelines, and target models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/TurnGate.

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BibTeX

@misc{shen2026one,
  title = {One Turn Too Late: Response-Aware Defense Against Hidden Malicious Intent in Multi-Turn Dialogue},
  author = {Xinjie Shen and Rongzhe Wei and Peizhi Niu and Haoyu Wang and Ruihan Wu and Eli Chien and Bo Li and Pin-Yu Chen and Pan Li},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Hidden malicious intent in multi-turn dialogue poses a growing threat to deployed large language models (LLMs). Rather than exposing a harmful objective in a single prompt, increasingly capable attackers can distribute their intent across multiple benign-looking turns. Recent studies show that even modern commercial models with advanced guardrails remain vulnerable to such attacks despite advances in safety alignment and external guardrails. In this work, we address this challenge by detecting t},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.05630},
  keywords = {large language models, malicious intent, multi-turn dialogue, harm-enabling closure point, turn-level intervention, Multi-Turn Intent Dataset, TurnGate, benign hard negatives, harmful-intent detection, over-refusal rates, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2605.05630},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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