The Vulnerability of LLM Rankers to Prompt Injection Attacks

Abstract: LLMs have emerged as powerful re-rankers. Recent research has however showed that simple prompt injections embedded within a candidate document (i.e., jailbreak prompt attacks) can significantly alter an LLM's ranking decisions. While this poses serious security risks to LLM-based ranking pipelines, the extent to which this vulnerability persists across diverse LLM families, architectures, and settings remains largely under-explored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study of jailbreak prompt attacks against LLM rankers. We focus our evaluation on two complementary tasks: (1) Preference Vulnerability Assessment, measuring intrinsic susceptibility via attack success rate (ASR); and (2) Ranking Vulnerability Assessment, quantifying the operational impact on the ranking's quality (nDCG@10). We systematically examine three prevalent ranking paradigms (pairwise, listwise, setwise) under two injection variants: decision objective hijacking and decision criteria hijacking. Beyond reproducing prior findings, we expand the analysis to cover vulnerability scaling across model families, position sensitivity, backbone architectures, and cross-domain robustness. Our results characterize the boundary conditions of these vulnerabilities, revealing critical insights such as that encoder-decoder architectures exhibit strong inherent resilience to jailbreak attacks. We publicly release our code and additional experimental results at https://github.com/ielab/LLM-Ranker-Attack.