Logits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Finlayson, Matthew, Ren, Xiang, Swayamdipta, Swabha
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866912111779643392
author Finlayson, Matthew
Ren, Xiang
Swayamdipta, Swabha
author_facet Finlayson, Matthew
Ren, Xiang
Swayamdipta, Swabha
contents Large language model (LLM) providers often hide the architectural details and parameters of their proprietary models by restricting public access to a limited API. In this work we show that, with only a conservative assumption about the model architecture, it is possible to learn a surprisingly large amount of non-public information about an API-protected LLM from a relatively small number of API queries (e.g., costing under $1000 USD for OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo). Our findings are centered on one key observation: most modern LLMs suffer from a softmax bottleneck, which restricts the model outputs to a linear subspace of the full output space. We exploit this fact to unlock several capabilities, including (but not limited to) obtaining cheap full-vocabulary outputs, auditing for specific types of model updates, identifying the source LLM given a single full LLM output, and even efficiently discovering the LLM's hidden size. Our empirical investigations show the effectiveness of our methods, which allow us to estimate the embedding size of OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to be about 4096. Lastly, we discuss ways that LLM providers can guard against these attacks, as well as how these capabilities can be viewed as a feature (rather than a bug) by allowing for greater transparency and accountability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_09539
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Logits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information
Finlayson, Matthew
Ren, Xiang
Swayamdipta, Swabha
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
68T50
I.2.7
Large language model (LLM) providers often hide the architectural details and parameters of their proprietary models by restricting public access to a limited API. In this work we show that, with only a conservative assumption about the model architecture, it is possible to learn a surprisingly large amount of non-public information about an API-protected LLM from a relatively small number of API queries (e.g., costing under $1000 USD for OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo). Our findings are centered on one key observation: most modern LLMs suffer from a softmax bottleneck, which restricts the model outputs to a linear subspace of the full output space. We exploit this fact to unlock several capabilities, including (but not limited to) obtaining cheap full-vocabulary outputs, auditing for specific types of model updates, identifying the source LLM given a single full LLM output, and even efficiently discovering the LLM's hidden size. Our empirical investigations show the effectiveness of our methods, which allow us to estimate the embedding size of OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to be about 4096. Lastly, we discuss ways that LLM providers can guard against these attacks, as well as how these capabilities can be viewed as a feature (rather than a bug) by allowing for greater transparency and accountability.
title Logits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
68T50
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09539