Jailbreaking as a Reward Misspecification Problem

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, Zhihui, Gao, Jiahui, Li, Lei, Li, Zhenguo, Liu, Qi, Kong, Lingpeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xie, Zhihui
Gao, Jiahui
Li, Lei
Li, Zhenguo
Liu, Qi
Kong, Lingpeng
author_facet Xie, Zhihui
Gao, Jiahui
Li, Lei
Li, Zhenguo
Liu, Qi
Kong, Lingpeng
contents The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their safety and reliability, particularly regarding their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective that attributes this vulnerability to reward misspecification during the alignment process. This misspecification occurs when the reward function fails to accurately capture the intended behavior, leading to misaligned model outputs. We introduce a metric ReGap to quantify the extent of reward misspecification and demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness in detecting harmful backdoor prompts. Building upon these insights, we present ReMiss, a system for automated red teaming that generates adversarial prompts in a reward-misspecified space. ReMiss achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on the AdvBench benchmark against various target aligned LLMs while preserving the human readability of the generated prompts. Furthermore, these attacks on open-source models demonstrate high transferability to closed-source models like GPT-4o and out-of-distribution tasks from HarmBench. Detailed analysis highlights the unique advantages of the proposed reward misspecification objective compared to previous methods, offering new insights for improving LLM safety and robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_14393
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Jailbreaking as a Reward Misspecification Problem
Xie, Zhihui
Gao, Jiahui
Li, Lei
Li, Zhenguo
Liu, Qi
Kong, Lingpeng
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their safety and reliability, particularly regarding their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective that attributes this vulnerability to reward misspecification during the alignment process. This misspecification occurs when the reward function fails to accurately capture the intended behavior, leading to misaligned model outputs. We introduce a metric ReGap to quantify the extent of reward misspecification and demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness in detecting harmful backdoor prompts. Building upon these insights, we present ReMiss, a system for automated red teaming that generates adversarial prompts in a reward-misspecified space. ReMiss achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on the AdvBench benchmark against various target aligned LLMs while preserving the human readability of the generated prompts. Furthermore, these attacks on open-source models demonstrate high transferability to closed-source models like GPT-4o and out-of-distribution tasks from HarmBench. Detailed analysis highlights the unique advantages of the proposed reward misspecification objective compared to previous methods, offering new insights for improving LLM safety and robustness.
title Jailbreaking as a Reward Misspecification Problem
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14393