Concept Enhancement Engineering: A Lightweight and Efficient Robust Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks in Embodied AI (2504.13201v1)

Abstract: Embodied Intelligence (EI) systems integrated with LLMs face significant security risks, particularly from jailbreak attacks that manipulate models into generating harmful outputs or executing unsafe physical actions. Traditional defense strategies, such as input filtering and output monitoring, often introduce high computational overhead or interfere with task performance in real-time embodied scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Concept Enhancement Engineering (CEE), a novel defense framework that leverages representation engineering to enhance the safety of embodied LLMs by dynamically steering their internal activations. CEE operates by (1) extracting multilingual safety patterns from model activations, (2) constructing control directions based on safety-aligned concept subspaces, and (3) applying subspace concept rotation to reinforce safe behavior during inference. Our experiments demonstrate that CEE effectively mitigates jailbreak attacks while maintaining task performance, outperforming existing defense methods in both robustness and efficiency. This work contributes a scalable and interpretable safety mechanism for embodied AI, bridging the gap between theoretical representation engineering and practical security applications. Our findings highlight the potential of latent-space interventions as a viable defense paradigm against emerging adversarial threats in physically grounded AI systems.