LLM-Virus: Evolutionary Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Miao, Fang, Junfeng, Zhou, Yingjie, Fan, Xing, Wang, Kun, Pan, Shirui, Wen, Qingsong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yu, Miao
Fang, Junfeng
Zhou, Yingjie
Fan, Xing
Wang, Kun
Pan, Shirui
Wen, Qingsong
author_facet Yu, Miao
Fang, Junfeng
Zhou, Yingjie
Fan, Xing
Wang, Kun
Pan, Shirui
Wen, Qingsong
contents While safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as the cornerstone for powerful systems such as multi-agent frameworks to solve complex real-world problems, they still suffer from potential adversarial queries, such as jailbreak attacks, which attempt to induce harmful content. Researching attack methods allows us to better understand the limitations of LLM and make trade-offs between helpfulness and safety. However, existing jailbreak attacks are primarily based on opaque optimization techniques (e.g. token-level gradient descent) and heuristic search methods like LLM refinement, which fall short in terms of transparency, transferability, and computational cost. In light of these limitations, we draw inspiration from the evolution and infection processes of biological viruses and propose LLM-Virus, a jailbreak attack method based on evolutionary algorithm, termed evolutionary jailbreak. LLM-Virus treats jailbreak attacks as both an evolutionary and transfer learning problem, utilizing LLMs as heuristic evolutionary operators to ensure high attack efficiency, transferability, and low time cost. Our experimental results on multiple safety benchmarks show that LLM-Virus achieves competitive or even superior performance compared to existing attack methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_00055
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-Virus: Evolutionary Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models
Yu, Miao
Fang, Junfeng
Zhou, Yingjie
Fan, Xing
Wang, Kun
Pan, Shirui
Wen, Qingsong
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
While safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as the cornerstone for powerful systems such as multi-agent frameworks to solve complex real-world problems, they still suffer from potential adversarial queries, such as jailbreak attacks, which attempt to induce harmful content. Researching attack methods allows us to better understand the limitations of LLM and make trade-offs between helpfulness and safety. However, existing jailbreak attacks are primarily based on opaque optimization techniques (e.g. token-level gradient descent) and heuristic search methods like LLM refinement, which fall short in terms of transparency, transferability, and computational cost. In light of these limitations, we draw inspiration from the evolution and infection processes of biological viruses and propose LLM-Virus, a jailbreak attack method based on evolutionary algorithm, termed evolutionary jailbreak. LLM-Virus treats jailbreak attacks as both an evolutionary and transfer learning problem, utilizing LLMs as heuristic evolutionary operators to ensure high attack efficiency, transferability, and low time cost. Our experimental results on multiple safety benchmarks show that LLM-Virus achieves competitive or even superior performance compared to existing attack methods.
title LLM-Virus: Evolutionary Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00055