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Understanding and Enhancing the Transferability of Jailbreaking Attacks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Content Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language. Jailbreaking attacks can effectively manipulate open-source large language models (LLMs) to produce harmful responses. However, these attacks exhibit limited transferability, failing to disrupt proprietary LLMs consistently. To reliably identify vulnerabilities in proprietary LLMs, this work investigates the transferability of jailbreaking attacks by analysing their impact on the model's intent perception. Nevertheless, these adversarial sequences fail to mislead the target LLM's intent perception, allowing the target LLM to refocus on malicious-intent tokens and abstain from responding. Our analysis further reveals the inherent distributional dependency within the generated adversarial sequences, whose effectiveness stems from overfitting the source LLM's parameters, resulting in limited transferability to target LLMs. To this end, we propose the Perceived-importance Flatten (PiF) method, which uniformly disperses the model's focus across neutral-intent tokens in the original input, thus obscuring malicious-intent tokens without relying on overfitted adversarial sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PiF provides an effective and efficient red-teaming evaluation for proprietary LLMs. Empowered by massive corpus, large language models (LLMs) have achieved human-level conversational capabilities (OpenAI, 2023a; Google, 2023; Meta, 2024) and are widely employed in real-world applications. However, their training corpus is mainly crawled from the Internet without thorough ethical review, raising concerns about the potential risks associated with LLMs. Recent red-teaming efforts highlight that jailbreaking attacks can effectively disrupt LLMs to produce undesirable content with harmful consequences (Perez et al., 2022; Ganguli et al., 2022; Ouyang et al., 2022). Unlike model-level jailbreaks that necessitate parameter modifications and are restricted to opensource LLMs (Qi et al., 2024; Huang et al., 2023a), token-level and prompt-level jailbreaks can generate transferable adversarial sequences (Yu et al., 2023; Lapid et al., 2023), thus posing a potential threat to widespread proprietary LLMs (Zou et al., 2023; Chao et al., 2023). Nevertheless, empirical results indicate that these adversarial sequences lack reliable transferability, failing to consistently manipulate target LLMs (Chao et al., 2024; Chen et al., 2024). Furthermore, these lengthy adversarial sequences can be further countered by adaptive jailbreaking detection and defence (Alon & Kamfonas, 2023; Inan et al., 2023; Robey et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2024a). As depicted in Figure 1, developing jailbreak attacks that can reliably identify vulnerabilities in proprietary LLMs--thereby promoting human alignment and preventing future misuse--remains a significant challenge. These attacks are initially generated on the source LLM (Llama-2-7B-Chat) and subsequently transferred to the target LLM (Llama-2-13B-Chat).


REALEDIT: Reddit Edits As a Large-scale Empirical Dataset for Image Transformations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing image editing models struggle to meet real-world demands. Despite excelling in academic benchmarks, they have yet to be widely adopted for real user needs. Datasets that power these models use artificial edits, lacking the scale and ecological validity necessary to address the true diversity of user requests. We introduce REALEDIT, a large-scale image editing dataset with authentic user requests and human-made edits sourced from Reddit. REALEDIT includes a test set of 9300 examples to evaluate models on real user requests. Our results show that existing models fall short on these tasks, highlighting the need for realistic training data. To address this, we introduce 48K training examples and train our REALEDIT model, achieving substantial gains - outperforming competitors by up to 165 Elo points in human judgment and 92 percent relative improvement on the automated VIEScore metric. We deploy our model on Reddit, testing it on new requests, and receive positive feedback. Beyond image editing, we explore REALEDIT's potential in detecting edited images by partnering with a deepfake detection non-profit. Finetuning their model on REALEDIT data improves its F1-score by 14 percentage points, underscoring the dataset's value for broad applications.


Contrastive Token-level Explanations for Graph-based Rumour Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The widespread use of social media has accelerated the dissemination of information, but it has also facilitated the spread of harmful rumours, which can disrupt economies, influence political outcomes, and exacerbate public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. While Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based approaches have shown significant promise in automated rumour detection, they often lack transparency, making their predictions difficult to interpret. Existing graph explainability techniques fall short in addressing the unique challenges posed by the dependencies among feature dimensions in high-dimensional text embeddings used in GNN-based models. In this paper, we introduce Contrastive Token Layerwise Relevance Propagation (CT-LRP), a novel framework designed to enhance the explainability of GNN-based rumour detection. CT-LRP extends current graph explainability methods by providing token-level explanations that offer greater granularity and interpretability. We evaluate the effectiveness of CT-LRP across multiple GNN models trained on three publicly available rumour detection datasets, demonstrating that it consistently produces high-fidelity, meaningful explanations, paving the way for more robust and trustworthy rumour detection systems.


FACTER: Fairness-Aware Conformal Thresholding and Prompt Engineering for Enabling Fair LLM-Based Recommender Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose FACTER, a fairness-aware framework for LLM-based recommendation systems that integrates conformal prediction with dynamic prompt engineering. By introducing an adaptive semantic variance threshold and a violation-triggered mechanism, FACTER automatically tightens fairness constraints whenever biased patterns emerge. We further develop an adversarial prompt generator that leverages historical violations to reduce repeated demographic biases without retraining the LLM. Empirical results on MovieLens and Amazon show that FACTER substantially reduces fairness violations (up to 95.5%) while maintaining strong recommendation accuracy, revealing semantic variance as a potent proxy of bias.


Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily, plays a key role in the formation of echo chambers which further amplify polarization and division. Existing works examining homophily in online communities traditionally infer it using content- or adjacency-based approaches, such as constructing explicit interaction networks or performing topic analysis. These methods fall short for platforms where interaction networks cannot be easily constructed and fail to capture the complex nature of user interactions across the platform. This work introduces a novel approach for quantifying user homophily. We first use an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) framework to infer users' policies, then use these policies as a measure of behavioral homophily. We apply our method to Reddit, conducting a case study across 5.9 million interactions over six years, demonstrating how this approach uncovers distinct behavioral patterns and user roles that vary across different communities. We further validate our behavioral homophily measure against traditional content-based homophily, offering a powerful method for analyzing social media dynamics and their broader societal implications. We find, among others, that users can behave very similarly (high behavioral homophily) when discussing entirely different topics like soccer vs e-sports (low topical homophily), and that there is an entire class of users on Reddit whose purpose seems to be to disagree with others.


Position: Editing Large Language Models Poses Serious Safety Risks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) contain large amounts of facts about the world. These facts can become outdated over time, which has led to the development of knowledge editing methods (KEs) that can change specific facts in LLMs with limited side effects. This position paper argues that editing LLMs poses serious safety risks that have been largely overlooked. First, we note the fact that KEs are widely available, computationally inexpensive, highly performant, and stealthy makes them an attractive tool for malicious actors. Second, we discuss malicious use cases of KEs, showing how KEs can be easily adapted for a variety of malicious purposes. Third, we highlight vulnerabilities in the AI ecosystem that allow unrestricted uploading and downloading of updated models without verification. Fourth, we argue that a lack of social and institutional awareness exacerbates this risk, and discuss the implications for different stakeholders. We call on the community to (i) research tamper-resistant models and countermeasures against malicious model editing, and (ii) actively engage in securing the AI ecosystem.


Out-of-Distribution Detection using Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Distinguishing in- and out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is crucial for reliable deployment of classification systems. However, OOD data is typically unavailable or difficult to collect, posing a significant challenge for accurate OOD detection. In this work, we present a method that harnesses the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create high-quality synthetic OOD proxies, eliminating the dependency on any external OOD data source. We study the efficacy of our method on classical text classification tasks such as toxicity detection and sentiment classification as well as classification tasks arising in LLM development and deployment, such as training a reward model for RLHF and detecting misaligned generations. Extensive experiments on nine InD-OOD dataset pairs and various model sizes show that our approach dramatically lowers false positive rates (achieving a perfect zero in some cases) while maintaining high accuracy on in-distribution tasks, outperforming baseline methods by a significant margin.


Lowering the Barrier of Machine Learning: Achieving Zero Manual Labeling in Review Classification Using LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the internet's evolution, consumers increasingly rely on online reviews for service or product choices, necessitating that businesses analyze extensive customer feedback to enhance their offerings. While machine learning-based sentiment classification shows promise in this realm, its technical complexity often bars small businesses and individuals from leveraging such advancements, which may end up making the competitive gap between small and large businesses even bigger in terms of improving customer satisfaction. This paper introduces an approach that integrates large language models (LLMs), specifically Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based models, making it accessible to a wider audience. Our experiments across various datasets confirm that our approach retains high classification accuracy without the need for manual labeling, expert knowledge in tuning and data annotation, or substantial computational power. By significantly lowering the barriers to applying sentiment classification techniques, our methodology enhances competitiveness and paves the way for making machine learning technology accessible to a broader audience.


Recommendations Beyond Catalogs: Diffusion Models for Personalized Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modern recommender systems follow the guiding principle of serving the right user, the right item at the right time. One of their main limitations is that they are typically limited to items already in the catalog. We propose REcommendations BEyond CAtalogs, REBECA, a new class of probabilistic diffusion-based recommender systems that synthesize new items tailored to individual tastes rather than retrieve items from the catalog. REBECA combines efficient training in embedding space with a novel diffusion prior that only requires users' past ratings of items. We evaluate REBECA on real-world data and propose novel personalization metrics for generative recommender systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REBECA produces high-quality, personalized recommendations, generating images that align with users' unique preferences.


This Clever New Book About the Apocalypse Will Cheer You Up (Really!)

Slate

So long as we can say'This is the worst,' " go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thing occurs, no one will be around to describe it. As the British journalist Dorian Lynskey relates in his erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering new book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, the fact that we can only ever speculate on the subject makes us speculate all the more frantically. "There is simply no end of ends," Lynskey writes of the books, movies, TV shows, pop songs, and video games we've created to depict the apocalypse--or its near misses and the aftermaths thereof. Station Eleven is often described as "postapocalyptic," but as Lynskey points out, the more accurate term would be "postcatastrophic." That's a better label for stories in which "the world has not ended, but a world has, creating a blank ...