Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fu, Yu, Li, Yufei, Xiao, Wen, Liu, Cong, Dong, Yue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06924
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914828705071104
author Fu, Yu
Li, Yufei
Xiao, Wen
Liu, Cong
Dong, Yue
author_facet Fu, Yu
Li, Yufei
Xiao, Wen
Liu, Cong
Dong, Yue
contents Recent developments in balancing the usefulness and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised a critical question: Are mainstream NLP tasks adequately aligned with safety consideration? Our study, focusing on safety-sensitive documents obtained through adversarial attacks, reveals significant disparities in the safety alignment of various NLP tasks. For instance, LLMs can effectively summarize malicious long documents but often refuse to translate them. This discrepancy highlights a previously unidentified vulnerability: attacks exploiting tasks with weaker safety alignment, like summarization, can potentially compromise the integrity of tasks traditionally deemed more robust, such as translation and question-answering (QA). Moreover, the concurrent use of multiple NLP tasks with lesser safety alignment increases the risk of LLMs inadvertently processing harmful content. We demonstrate these vulnerabilities in various safety-aligned LLMs, particularly Llama2 models, Gemini and GPT-4, indicating an urgent need for strengthening safety alignments across a broad spectrum of NLP tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_06924
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Safety Alignment in NLP Tasks: Weakly Aligned Summarization as an In-Context Attack
Fu, Yu
Li, Yufei
Xiao, Wen
Liu, Cong
Dong, Yue
Computation and Language
Recent developments in balancing the usefulness and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised a critical question: Are mainstream NLP tasks adequately aligned with safety consideration? Our study, focusing on safety-sensitive documents obtained through adversarial attacks, reveals significant disparities in the safety alignment of various NLP tasks. For instance, LLMs can effectively summarize malicious long documents but often refuse to translate them. This discrepancy highlights a previously unidentified vulnerability: attacks exploiting tasks with weaker safety alignment, like summarization, can potentially compromise the integrity of tasks traditionally deemed more robust, such as translation and question-answering (QA). Moreover, the concurrent use of multiple NLP tasks with lesser safety alignment increases the risk of LLMs inadvertently processing harmful content. We demonstrate these vulnerabilities in various safety-aligned LLMs, particularly Llama2 models, Gemini and GPT-4, indicating an urgent need for strengthening safety alignments across a broad spectrum of NLP tasks.
title Safety Alignment in NLP Tasks: Weakly Aligned Summarization as an In-Context Attack
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06924