Large Language Model
Improved Few-Shot Jailbreaking Can Circumvent Aligned Language Models and Their Defenses
Nevertheless, is it possible to use few-shot demonstrations to efficiently jailbreak LLMs within limited context sizes? While the vanilla few-shot jailbreaking may be inefficient, we propose improved techniques such as injecting special system tokens like [/INST] and employing demo-level random search from a collected demo pool. These simple techniques result in surprisingly effective jailbreaking against aligned LLMs (even with advanced defenses). For example, our method achieves 80% (mostly 95%) ASRs on Llama-2-7B and Llama-3-8B without multiple restarts, even if the models are enhanced by strong defenses such as perplexity detection and/or SmoothLLM, which is challenging for suffix-based jailbreaking. In addition, we conduct comprehensive and elaborate (e.g., making sure to use correct system prompts) evaluations against other aligned LLMs and advanced defenses, where our method consistently achieves nearly 100% ASRs.
Where does In-context Learning Happen in Large Language Models?
Self-supervised large language models have demonstrated the ability to perform various tasks via in-context learning, but little is known about where the model locates the task with respect to prompt instructions and demonstration examples. In this work, we attempt to characterize the region where large language models transition from recognizing the task to performing the task. Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, on Machine Translation and Code generation, we demonstrate evidence of a "task recognition" point where the task is encoded into the input representations and attention to context is no longer necessary. Taking advantage of this redundancy results in 45% computational savings when prompting with 5 examples, and task recognition achieved at layer 14 / 32 using an example with Machine Translation. Our findings also have implications for resource and parameter efficient fine-tuning; we observe a correspondence between strong fine-tuning performance of individual LoRA layers and the task recognition layers.
Fast Best-of-N Decoding via Speculative Rejection
The safe and effective deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) involves a critical step called alignment, which ensures that the model's responses are in accordance with human preferences. Prevalent alignment techniques, such as DPO, PPO and their variants, align LLMs by changing the pre-trained model weights during a phase called post-training. While predominant, these post-training methods add substantial complexity before LLMs can be deployed. Inference-time alignment methods avoid the complex post-training step and instead bias the generation towards responses that are aligned with human preferences. The best-known inference-time alignment method, called Best-of-N, is as effective as the state-of-the-art post-training procedures.
Masked Pre-training Enables Universal Zero-shot Denoiser
In this work, we observe that model trained on vast general images via masking strategy, has been naturally embedded with their distribution knowledge, thus spontaneously attains the underlying potential for strong image denoising.Based on this observation, we propose a novel zero-shot denoising paradigm, i.e., \textbf{M} asked \textbf{P} re-train then \textbf{I} terative fill ( \textbf{MPI}).MPI first trains model via masking and then employs pre-trained weight for high-quality zero-shot image denoising on a single noisy image.Concretely, MPI comprises two key procedures: \textbf{1) Masked Pre-training} involves training model to reconstruct massive natural images with random masking for generalizable representations, gathering the potential for valid zero-shot denoising on images with varying noise degradation and even in distinct image types. It iteratively optimizes the image by leveraging pre-trained weights, focusing on alternate reconstruction of different image parts, and gradually assembles fully denoised image within limited number of iterations.Comprehensive experiments across various noisy scenarios underscore the notable advances of MPI over previous approaches with a marked reduction in inference time.
Large Language Models' Expert-level Global History Knowledge Benchmark (HiST-LLM)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform humanities and social science research, yet their history knowledge and comprehension at a graduate level remains untested. Benchmarking LLMs in history is particularly challenging, given that human knowledge of history is inherently unbalanced, with more information available on Western history and recent periods. We introduce the History Seshat Test for LLMs (HiST-LLM), based on a subset of the Seshat Global History Databank, which provides a structured representation of human historical knowledge, containing 36,000 data points across 600 historical societies and over 2,700 scholarly references. This dataset covers every major world region from the Neolithic period to the Industrial Revolution and includes information reviewed and assembled by history experts and graduate research assistants. We find that, in a four-choice format, LLMs have a balanced accuracy ranging from 33.6% (Llama-3.1-8B)
Bag of Tricks: Benchmarking of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in executing complex tasks in a zero-shot manner, they are susceptible to jailbreak attacks and can be manipulated to produce harmful outputs. Recently, a growing body of research has categorized jailbreak attacks into token-level and prompt-level attacks. However, previous work primarily overlooks the diverse key factors of jailbreak attacks, with most studies concentrating on LLM vulnerabilities and lacking exploration of defense-enhanced LLMs. To address these issues, we introduced JailTrickBench to evaluate the impact of various attack settings on LLM performance and provide a baseline for jailbreak attacks, encouraging the adoption of a standardized evaluation framework. Specifically, we evaluate the eight key factors of implementing jailbreak attacks on LLMs from both target-level and attack-level perspectives. We further conduct seven representative jailbreak attacks on six defense methods across two widely used datasets, encompassing approximately 354 experiments with about 55,000 GPU hours on A800-80G.
E.T. Bench: Towards Open-Ended Event-Level Video-Language Understanding
Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated their great potential in general-purpose video understanding. To verify the significance of these models, a number of benchmarks have been proposed to diagnose their capabilities in different scenarios. However, existing benchmarks merely evaluate models through video-level question-answering, lacking fine-grained event-level assessment and task diversity. To fill this gap, we introduce E.T. Bench (Event-Level & Time-Sensitive Video Understanding Benchmark), a large-scale and high-quality benchmark for open-ended event-level video understanding. Categorized within a 3-level task taxonomy, E.T. Bench encompasses 7.3K samples under 12 tasks with 7K videos (251.4h
The Emergence of Objectness: Learning Zero-shot Segmentation from Videos
Humans can easily detect and segment moving objects simply by observing how they move, even without knowledge of object semantics. Inspired by this, we develop a zero-shot unsupervised approach for learning object segmentations. The model comprises two visual pathways: an appearance pathway that segments individual RGB images into coherent object regions, and a motion pathway that predicts the flow vector for each region between consecutive video frames. The two pathways jointly reconstruct a new representation called segment flow. This decoupled representation of appearance and motion is trained in a self-supervised manner to reconstruct one frame from another.When pretrained on an unlabeled video corpus, the model can be useful for a variety of applications, including 1) primary object segmentation from a single image in a zero-shot fashion; 2) moving object segmentation from a video with unsupervised test-time adaptation; 3) image semantic segmentation by supervised fine-tuning on a labeled image dataset.
Wings: Learning Multimodal LLMs without Text-only Forgetting
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), initiated with a trained LLM, first align images with text and then fine-tune on multimodal mixed inputs. However, during the continued training, the MLLM catastrophically forgets the text-only instructions that the initial LLM masters. By examining attention across layers of MLLM, we find that text-only forgetting is related to the attention shifts from pre-image to post-image text. From that, we construct an additional Low-Rank Residual Attention (LoRRA) block that acts as the "modality learner" to expand the learnable space and compensate for the attention shift. The complementary learners, like "wings" on either side, are connected in parallel to each layer's attention block.
GameTraversalBenchmark: Evaluating Planning Abilities Of Large Language Models Through Traversing 2D Game Maps
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated great success in generating and understanding natural language. While they have also shown potential beyond the domain of natural language, it remains an open question as to what extent and in which way these LLMs can plan. We investigate their planning capabilities by proposing \texttt{GameTraversalBenchmark (GTB)}, a benchmark consisting of diverse 2D grid-based game maps. An LLM succeeds if it can traverse through given objectives, with a minimum number of steps and a minimum number of generation errors. We evaluate a number of LLMs on \texttt{GTB} and found that GPT-4-Turbo achieved the highest score of 44.97\% on \texttt{GTB\_Score} (GTBS), a composite score that combines the three above criteria.