Unleashing the Unseen: Harnessing Benign Datasets for Jailbreaking Large Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Wei, Li, Zhe, Li, Yige, Sun, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhao, Wei
Li, Zhe
Li, Yige
Sun, Jun
author_facet Zhao, Wei
Li, Zhe
Li, Yige
Sun, Jun
contents Despite significant ongoing efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and LLaMA 3 remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that can induce harmful behaviors, including through the use of adversarial suffixes. Building on prior research, we hypothesize that these adversarial suffixes are not mere bugs but may represent features that can dominate the LLM's behavior. To evaluate this hypothesis, we conduct several experiments. First, we demonstrate that benign features can be effectively made to function as adversarial suffixes, i.e., we develop a feature extraction method to extract sample-agnostic features from benign dataset in the form of suffixes and show that these suffixes may effectively compromise safety alignment. Second, we show that adversarial suffixes generated from jailbreak attacks may contain meaningful features, i.e., appending the same suffix to different prompts results in responses exhibiting specific characteristics. Third, we show that such benign-yet-safety-compromising features can be easily introduced through fine-tuning using only benign datasets. As a result, we are able to completely eliminate GPT's safety alignment in a blackbox setting through finetuning with only benign data. Our code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/suffix-maybe-feature/adver-suffix-maybe-features}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_00451
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unleashing the Unseen: Harnessing Benign Datasets for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
Zhao, Wei
Li, Zhe
Li, Yige
Sun, Jun
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Despite significant ongoing efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and LLaMA 3 remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that can induce harmful behaviors, including through the use of adversarial suffixes. Building on prior research, we hypothesize that these adversarial suffixes are not mere bugs but may represent features that can dominate the LLM's behavior. To evaluate this hypothesis, we conduct several experiments. First, we demonstrate that benign features can be effectively made to function as adversarial suffixes, i.e., we develop a feature extraction method to extract sample-agnostic features from benign dataset in the form of suffixes and show that these suffixes may effectively compromise safety alignment. Second, we show that adversarial suffixes generated from jailbreak attacks may contain meaningful features, i.e., appending the same suffix to different prompts results in responses exhibiting specific characteristics. Third, we show that such benign-yet-safety-compromising features can be easily introduced through fine-tuning using only benign datasets. As a result, we are able to completely eliminate GPT's safety alignment in a blackbox setting through finetuning with only benign data. Our code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/suffix-maybe-feature/adver-suffix-maybe-features}.
title Unleashing the Unseen: Harnessing Benign Datasets for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00451