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Catastrophic Jailbreak of Open-source LLMs via Exploiting Generation

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2310.06987

Summary

Safety tuning of open-source LLMs is usually checked under one fixed decoding setup. For example, LLaMA2 was assessed with top-p 0.9, temperature 0.1 and a system prompt. The authors argue that this narrow testing hides serious weaknesses. They introduce the generation exploitation attack, which changes no input text. It simply drops the system prompt and sweeps decoding choices: temperature, top-k, top-p, plus multiple sampling and constrained decoding. They tested 11 models from the LLaMA2, Vicuna, Falcon and MPT families on AdvBench and on MaliciousInstruct, a new benchmark they built. Outputs were scored with a trained classifier that matches human judgments better than string matching does. Misalignment rose from near zero to above 95% at roughly 30× less compute than the leading adversarial-prompt attack. As a countermeasure, the authors propose generation-aware alignment, which fine-tunes on responses sampled under many decoding configurations. The study shows that red teaming should cover a range of generation strategies, not just the defaults.

Key points

  • Benchmarks: AdvBench has 500 harmful instructions. MaliciousInstruct has 100 instructions spread over ten intent categories, including tax fraud, hacking, defamation and cyberbullying.
  • Attack strength: Varying decoding alone pushed 9 of 11 models above 95% misalignment. Combining all techniques pushed every model past that level. Human review found that at least half of the misaligned answers contained genuinely harmful instructions.
  • LLaMA2-chat on MaliciousInstruct: With the system prompt and greedy decoding, the attack success rate was 0%. Without the system prompt and with varied decoding, it reached 81% (7B) and 88% (13B).
  • Defense: Generation-aware alignment lowered misalignment from 95% to 69%.
  • Proprietary model: The same approach against gpt-3.5-turbo through the OpenAI API succeeded only about 7% of the time. Code is available at github.com/Princeton-SysML/Jailbreak_LLM.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Other

Cited by

151 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 10 of them have a page here, 141 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2310.06987 · arXiv 2310.06987

@misc{huang2023catastrophic,
  title = {{Catastrophic Jailbreak of Open-source LLMs via Exploiting Generation}},
  author = {Huang, Yangsibo and Gupta, Samyak and Xia, Mengzhou and Li, Kai and Chen, Danqi},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2310.06987},
  eprint = {2310.06987},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2310.06987}
}

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