Humanizing the Machine: Proxy Attacks to Mislead LLM Detectors

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Tianchun, Chen, Yuanzhou, Liu, Zichuan, Chen, Zhanwen, Chen, Haifeng, Zhang, Xiang, Cheng, Wei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Wang, Tianchun
Chen, Yuanzhou
Liu, Zichuan
Chen, Zhanwen
Chen, Haifeng
Zhang, Xiang
Cheng, Wei
author_facet Wang, Tianchun
Chen, Yuanzhou
Liu, Zichuan
Chen, Zhanwen
Chen, Haifeng
Zhang, Xiang
Cheng, Wei
contents The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of text generation, producing outputs that closely mimic human-like writing. Although academic and industrial institutions have developed detectors to prevent the malicious usage of LLM-generated texts, other research has doubt about the robustness of these systems. To stress test these detectors, we introduce a proxy-attack strategy that effortlessly compromises LLMs, causing them to produce outputs that align with human-written text and mislead detection systems. Our method attacks the source model by leveraging a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuned humanized small language model (SLM) in the decoding phase. Through an in-depth analysis, we demonstrate that our attack strategy is capable of generating responses that are indistinguishable to detectors, preventing them from differentiating between machine-generated and human-written text. We conduct systematic evaluations on extensive datasets using proxy-attacked open-source models, including Llama2-13B, Llama3-70B, and Mixtral-8*7B in both white- and black-box settings. Our findings show that the proxy-attack strategy effectively deceives the leading detectors, resulting in an average AUROC drop of 70.4% across multiple datasets, with a maximum drop of 90.3% on a single dataset. Furthermore, in cross-discipline scenarios, our strategy also bypasses these detectors, leading to a significant relative decrease of up to 90.9%, while in cross-language scenario, the drop reaches 91.3%. Despite our proxy-attack strategy successfully bypassing the detectors with such significant relative drops, we find that the generation quality of the attacked models remains preserved, even within a modest utility budget, when compared to the text produced by the original, unattacked source model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_19230
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Humanizing the Machine: Proxy Attacks to Mislead LLM Detectors
Wang, Tianchun
Chen, Yuanzhou
Liu, Zichuan
Chen, Zhanwen
Chen, Haifeng
Zhang, Xiang
Cheng, Wei
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of text generation, producing outputs that closely mimic human-like writing. Although academic and industrial institutions have developed detectors to prevent the malicious usage of LLM-generated texts, other research has doubt about the robustness of these systems. To stress test these detectors, we introduce a proxy-attack strategy that effortlessly compromises LLMs, causing them to produce outputs that align with human-written text and mislead detection systems. Our method attacks the source model by leveraging a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuned humanized small language model (SLM) in the decoding phase. Through an in-depth analysis, we demonstrate that our attack strategy is capable of generating responses that are indistinguishable to detectors, preventing them from differentiating between machine-generated and human-written text. We conduct systematic evaluations on extensive datasets using proxy-attacked open-source models, including Llama2-13B, Llama3-70B, and Mixtral-8*7B in both white- and black-box settings. Our findings show that the proxy-attack strategy effectively deceives the leading detectors, resulting in an average AUROC drop of 70.4% across multiple datasets, with a maximum drop of 90.3% on a single dataset. Furthermore, in cross-discipline scenarios, our strategy also bypasses these detectors, leading to a significant relative decrease of up to 90.9%, while in cross-language scenario, the drop reaches 91.3%. Despite our proxy-attack strategy successfully bypassing the detectors with such significant relative drops, we find that the generation quality of the attacked models remains preserved, even within a modest utility budget, when compared to the text produced by the original, unattacked source model.
title Humanizing the Machine: Proxy Attacks to Mislead LLM Detectors
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19230