Understanding Jailbreak Success: A Study of Latent Space Dynamics in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ball, Sarah, Kreuter, Frauke, Panickssery, Nina
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ball, Sarah
Kreuter, Frauke
Panickssery, Nina
author_facet Ball, Sarah
Kreuter, Frauke
Panickssery, Nina
contents Conversational large language models are trained to refuse to answer harmful questions. However, emergent jailbreaking techniques can still elicit unsafe outputs, presenting an ongoing challenge for model alignment. To better understand how different jailbreak types circumvent safeguards, this paper analyses model activations on different jailbreak inputs. We find that it is possible to extract a jailbreak vector from a single class of jailbreaks that works to mitigate jailbreak effectiveness from other semantically-dissimilar classes. This may indicate that different kinds of effective jailbreaks operate via a similar internal mechanism. We investigate a potential common mechanism of harmfulness feature suppression, and find evidence that effective jailbreaks noticeably reduce a model's perception of prompt harmfulness. These findings offer actionable insights for developing more robust jailbreak countermeasures and lay the groundwork for a deeper, mechanistic understanding of jailbreak dynamics in language models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09289
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Jailbreak Success: A Study of Latent Space Dynamics in Large Language Models
Ball, Sarah
Kreuter, Frauke
Panickssery, Nina
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Conversational large language models are trained to refuse to answer harmful questions. However, emergent jailbreaking techniques can still elicit unsafe outputs, presenting an ongoing challenge for model alignment. To better understand how different jailbreak types circumvent safeguards, this paper analyses model activations on different jailbreak inputs. We find that it is possible to extract a jailbreak vector from a single class of jailbreaks that works to mitigate jailbreak effectiveness from other semantically-dissimilar classes. This may indicate that different kinds of effective jailbreaks operate via a similar internal mechanism. We investigate a potential common mechanism of harmfulness feature suppression, and find evidence that effective jailbreaks noticeably reduce a model's perception of prompt harmfulness. These findings offer actionable insights for developing more robust jailbreak countermeasures and lay the groundwork for a deeper, mechanistic understanding of jailbreak dynamics in language models.
title Understanding Jailbreak Success: A Study of Latent Space Dynamics in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09289