Compromesso! Italian Many-Shot Jailbreaks Undermine the Safety of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Pernisi, Fabio, Hovy, Dirk, Röttger, Paul
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Pernisi, Fabio
Hovy, Dirk
Röttger, Paul
author_facet Pernisi, Fabio
Hovy, Dirk
Röttger, Paul
contents As diverse linguistic communities and users adopt large language models (LLMs), assessing their safety across languages becomes critical. Despite ongoing efforts to make LLMs safe, they can still be made to behave unsafely with jailbreaking, a technique in which models are prompted to act outside their operational guidelines. Research on LLM safety and jailbreaking, however, has so far mostly focused on English, limiting our understanding of LLM safety in other languages. We contribute towards closing this gap by investigating the effectiveness of many-shot jailbreaking, where models are prompted with unsafe demonstrations to induce unsafe behaviour, in Italian. To enable our analysis, we create a new dataset of unsafe Italian question-answer pairs. With this dataset, we identify clear safety vulnerabilities in four families of open-weight LLMs. We find that the models exhibit unsafe behaviors even when prompted with few unsafe demonstrations, and -- more alarmingly -- that this tendency rapidly escalates with more demonstrations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_04522
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compromesso! Italian Many-Shot Jailbreaks Undermine the Safety of Large Language Models
Pernisi, Fabio
Hovy, Dirk
Röttger, Paul
Computation and Language
As diverse linguistic communities and users adopt large language models (LLMs), assessing their safety across languages becomes critical. Despite ongoing efforts to make LLMs safe, they can still be made to behave unsafely with jailbreaking, a technique in which models are prompted to act outside their operational guidelines. Research on LLM safety and jailbreaking, however, has so far mostly focused on English, limiting our understanding of LLM safety in other languages. We contribute towards closing this gap by investigating the effectiveness of many-shot jailbreaking, where models are prompted with unsafe demonstrations to induce unsafe behaviour, in Italian. To enable our analysis, we create a new dataset of unsafe Italian question-answer pairs. With this dataset, we identify clear safety vulnerabilities in four families of open-weight LLMs. We find that the models exhibit unsafe behaviors even when prompted with few unsafe demonstrations, and -- more alarmingly -- that this tendency rapidly escalates with more demonstrations.
title Compromesso! Italian Many-Shot Jailbreaks Undermine the Safety of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04522