scalar projection
Improved Generation of Adversarial Examples Against Safety-aligned LLMs
Li, Qizhang, Guo, Yiwen, Zuo, Wangmeng, Chen, Hao
Despite numerous efforts to ensure large language models (LLMs) adhere to safety standards and produce harmless content, some successes have been achieved in bypassing these restrictions, known as jailbreak attacks against LLMs. Adversarial prompts generated using gradient-based methods exhibit outstanding performance in performing jailbreak attacks automatically. Nevertheless, due to the discrete nature of texts, the input gradient of LLMs struggles to precisely reflect the magnitude of loss change that results from token replacements in the prompt, leading to limited attack success rates against safety-aligned LLMs, even in the white-box setting. In this paper, we explore a new perspective on this problem, suggesting that it can be alleviated by leveraging innovations inspired in transfer-based attacks that were originally proposed for attacking black-box image classification models. For the first time, we appropriate the ideologies of effective methods among these transfer-based attacks, i.e., Skip Gradient Method and Intermediate Level Attack, for improving the effectiveness of automatically generated adversarial examples against white-box LLMs. With appropriate adaptations, we inject these ideologies into gradient-based adversarial prompt generation processes and achieve significant performance gains without introducing obvious computational cost. Meanwhile, by discussing mechanisms behind the gains, new insights are drawn, and proper combinations of these methods are also developed. Our empirical results show that the developed combination achieves >30% absolute increase in attack success rates compared with GCG for attacking the Llama-2-7B-Chat model on AdvBench.
Moral consensus and divergence in partisan language use
Rim, Nakwon, Berman, Marc G., Leong, Yuan Chang
Polarization has increased substantially in political discourse, contributing to a widening partisan divide. In this paper, we analyzed large-scale, real-world language use in Reddit communities (294,476,146 comments) and in news outlets (6,749,781 articles) to uncover psychological dimensions along which partisan language is divided. Using word embedding models that captured semantic associations based on co-occurrences of words in vast textual corpora, we identified patterns of affective polarization present in natural political discourse. We then probed the semantic associations of words related to seven political topics (e.g., abortion, immigration) along the dimensions of morality (moral-to-immoral), threat (threatening-to-safe), and valence (pleasant-to-unpleasant). Across both Reddit communities and news outlets, we identified a small but systematic divergence in the moral associations of words between text sources with different partisan leanings. Moral associations of words were highly correlated between conservative and liberal text sources (average $\rho$ = 0.96), but the differences remained reliable to enable us to distinguish text sources along partisan lines with above 85% classification accuracy. These findings underscore that despite a shared moral understanding across the political spectrum, there are consistent differences that shape partisan language and potentially exacerbate political polarization. Our results, drawn from both informal interactions on social media and curated narratives in news outlets, indicate that these trends are widespread. Leveraging advanced computational techniques, this research offers a fresh perspective that complements traditional methods in political attitudes.
On Ullman's theorem in computer vision
Knill, Oliver, Ramirez-Herran, Jose
Both in the plane and in space, we invert the nonlinear Ullman transformation for 3 points and 3 orthographic cameras. While Ullman's theorem assures a unique reconstruction modulo a reflection for 3 cameras and 4 points, we find a locally unique reconstruction for 3 cameras and 3 points. Explicit reconstruction formulas allow to decide whether picture data of three cameras seeing three points can be realized as a point-camera configuration.