Daily Papers

Safety lies at the core of the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). There is ample work on aligning LLMs with human ethics and preferences, including data filtering in pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and red teaming, etc. In this study, we discover that chat in cipher can bypass the safety alignment techniques of LLMs, which are mainly conducted in natural languages. We propose a novel framework CipherChat to systematically examine the generalizability of safety alignment to non-natural languages -- ciphers. CipherChat enables humans to chat with LLMs through cipher prompts topped with system role descriptions and few-shot enciphered demonstrations. We use CipherChat to assess state-of-the-art LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4 for different representative human ciphers across 11 safety domains in both English and Chinese. Experimental results show that certain ciphers succeed almost 100% of the time to bypass the safety alignment of GPT-4 in several safety domains, demonstrating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-natural languages. Notably, we identify that LLMs seem to have a ''secret cipher'', and propose a novel SelfCipher that uses only role play and several demonstrations in natural language to evoke this capability. SelfCipher surprisingly outperforms existing human ciphers in almost all cases. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/RobustNLP/CipherChat.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, especially the recent advancements in reasoning, such as o1 and o3, pushing the boundaries of AI. Despite these impressive achievements in mathematics and coding, the reasoning abilities of LLMs in domains requiring cryptographic expertise remain underexplored. In this paper, we introduce CipherBank, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in cryptographic decryption tasks. CipherBank comprises 2,358 meticulously crafted problems, covering 262 unique plaintexts across 5 domains and 14 subdomains, with a focus on privacy-sensitive and real-world scenarios that necessitate encryption. From a cryptographic perspective, CipherBank incorporates 3 major categories of encryption methods, spanning 9 distinct algorithms, ranging from classical ciphers to custom cryptographic techniques. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on CipherBank, e.g., GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and cutting-edge reasoning-focused models such as o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Our results reveal significant gaps in reasoning abilities not only between general-purpose chat LLMs and reasoning-focused LLMs but also in the performance of current reasoning-focused models when applied to classical cryptographic decryption tasks, highlighting the challenges these models face in understanding and manipulating encrypted data. Through detailed analysis and error investigations, we provide several key observations that shed light on the limitations and potential improvement areas for LLMs in cryptographic reasoning. These findings underscore the need for continuous advancements in LLM reasoning capabilities.

Penetration testing, a critical component of cybersecurity, typically requires extensive time and effort to find vulnerabilities. Beginners in this field often benefit from collaborative approaches with the community or experts. To address this, we develop CIPHER (Cybersecurity Intelligent Penetration-testing Helper for Ethical Researchers), a large language model specifically trained to assist in penetration testing tasks. We trained CIPHER using over 300 high-quality write-ups of vulnerable machines, hacking techniques, and documentation of open-source penetration testing tools. Additionally, we introduced the Findings, Action, Reasoning, and Results (FARR) Flow augmentation, a novel method to augment penetration testing write-ups to establish a fully automated pentesting simulation benchmark tailored for large language models. This approach fills a significant gap in traditional cybersecurity Q\&A benchmarks and provides a realistic and rigorous standard for evaluating AI's technical knowledge, reasoning capabilities, and practical utility in dynamic penetration testing scenarios. In our assessments, CIPHER achieved the best overall performance in providing accurate suggestion responses compared to other open-source penetration testing models of similar size and even larger state-of-the-art models like Llama 3 70B and Qwen1.5 72B Chat, particularly on insane difficulty machine setups. This demonstrates that the current capabilities of general LLMs are insufficient for effectively guiding users through the penetration testing process. We also discuss the potential for improvement through scaling and the development of better benchmarks using FARR Flow augmentation results. Our benchmark will be released publicly at https://github.com/ibndias/CIPHER.

Discussion and debate among Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention due to their potential to enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs. Although natural language is an obvious choice for communication due to LLM's language understanding capability, the token sampling step needed when generating natural language poses a potential risk of information loss, as it uses only one token to represent the model's belief across the entire vocabulary. In this paper, we introduce a communication regime named CIPHER (Communicative Inter-Model Protocol Through Embedding Representation) to address this issue. Specifically, we remove the token sampling step from LLMs and let them communicate their beliefs across the vocabulary through the expectation of the raw transformer output embeddings. Remarkably, by deviating from natural language, CIPHER offers an advantage of encoding a broader spectrum of information without any modification to the model weights, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLM debate methods using natural language by 0.5-5.0% across five reasoning tasks and multiple open-source LLMs of varying sizes. This showcases the superiority and robustness of embeddings as an alternative "language" for communication among LLMs. We anticipate that CIPHER will inspire further exploration for the design of interactions within LLM agent systems, offering a new direction that could significantly influence future developments in the field.

Large language models (LLMs) are expected to follow instructions from users and engage in conversations. Techniques to enhance LLMs' instruction-following capabilities typically fine-tune them using data structured according to a predefined chat template. Although chat templates are shown to be effective in optimizing LLM performance, their impact on safety alignment of LLMs has been less understood, which is crucial for deploying LLMs safely at scale. In this paper, we investigate how chat templates affect safety alignment of LLMs. We identify a common vulnerability, named ChatBug, that is introduced by chat templates. Our key insight to identify ChatBug is that the chat templates provide a rigid format that need to be followed by LLMs, but not by users. Hence, a malicious user may not necessarily follow the chat template when prompting LLMs. Instead, malicious users could leverage their knowledge of the chat template and accordingly craft their prompts to bypass safety alignments of LLMs. We develop two attacks to exploit the ChatBug vulnerability. We demonstrate that a malicious user can exploit the ChatBug vulnerability of eight state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs and effectively elicit unintended responses from these models. Moreover, we show that ChatBug can be exploited by existing jailbreak attacks to enhance their attack success rates. We investigate potential countermeasures to ChatBug. Our results show that while adversarial training effectively mitigates the ChatBug vulnerability, the victim model incurs significant performance degradation. These results highlight the trade-off between safety alignment and helpfulness. Developing new methods for instruction tuning to balance this trade-off is an open and critical direction for future research

Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialog data is difficult, especially for highly specific domains that require expert knowledge. At the same time, informal communication channels such as instant messengers are increasingly being used at work. This has led to a lot of work-relevant information that is disseminated through those channels and needs to be post-processed manually by the employees. To alleviate this problem, we present TexPrax, a messaging system to collect and annotate problems, causes, and solutions that occur in work-related chats. TexPrax uses a chatbot to directly engage the employees to provide lightweight annotations on their conversation and ease their documentation work. To comply with data privacy and security regulations, we use an end-to-end message encryption and give our users full control over their data which has various advantages over conventional annotation tools. We evaluate TexPrax in a user-study with German factory employees who ask their colleagues for solutions on problems that arise during their daily work. Overall, we collect 202 task-oriented German dialogues containing 1,027 sentences with sentence-level expert annotations. Our data analysis also reveals that real-world conversations frequently contain instances with code-switching, varying abbreviations for the same entity, and dialects which NLP systems should be able to handle.

Whereas traditional cryptography encrypts a secret message into an unintelligible form, steganography conceals that communication is taking place by encoding a secret message into a cover signal. Language is a particularly pragmatic cover signal due to its benign occurrence and independence from any one medium. Traditionally, linguistic steganography systems encode secret messages in existing text via synonym substitution or word order rearrangements. Advances in neural language models enable previously impractical generation-based techniques. We propose a steganography technique based on arithmetic coding with large-scale neural language models. We find that our approach can generate realistic looking cover sentences as evaluated by humans, while at the same time preserving security by matching the cover message distribution with the language model distribution.

Recent researches have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to a security threat known as Backdoor Attack. The backdoored model will behave well in normal cases but exhibit malicious behaviours on inputs inserted with a specific backdoor trigger. Current backdoor studies on LLMs predominantly focus on instruction-tuned LLMs, while neglecting another realistic scenario where LLMs are fine-tuned on multi-turn conversational data to be chat models. Chat models are extensively adopted across various real-world scenarios, thus the security of chat models deserves increasing attention. Unfortunately, we point out that the flexible multi-turn interaction format instead increases the flexibility of trigger designs and amplifies the vulnerability of chat models to backdoor attacks. In this work, we reveal and achieve a novel backdoor attacking method on chat models by distributing multiple trigger scenarios across user inputs in different rounds, and making the backdoor be triggered only when all trigger scenarios have appeared in the historical conversations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve high attack success rates (e.g., over 90% ASR on Vicuna-7B) while successfully maintaining the normal capabilities of chat models on providing helpful responses to benign user requests. Also, the backdoor can not be easily removed by the downstream re-alignment, highlighting the importance of continued research and attention to the security concerns of chat models. Warning: This paper may contain toxic content.

Recently, we have witnessed a rise in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially in applications like chatbot assistants. Safety mechanisms and specialized training procedures are implemented to prevent improper responses from these assistants. In this work, we bypass these measures for ChatGPT and Gemini (and, to some extent, Bing chat) by making them impersonate complex personas with personality characteristics that are not aligned with a truthful assistant. We start by creating elaborate biographies of these personas, which we then use in a new session with the same chatbots. Our conversations then follow a role-play style to elicit prohibited responses. Using personas, we show that prohibited responses are actually provided, making it possible to obtain unauthorized, illegal, or harmful information. This work shows that by using adversarial personas, one can overcome safety mechanisms set out by ChatGPT and Gemini. We also introduce several ways of activating such adversarial personas, which show that both chatbots are vulnerable to this kind of attack. With the same principle, we introduce two defenses that push the model to interpret trustworthy personalities and make it more robust against such attacks.

The unparalleled performance of closed-sourced ChatGPT has sparked efforts towards its democratization, with notable strides made by leveraging real user and ChatGPT conversations, as evidenced by Vicuna. However, while current endeavors like Baize and UltraChat aim to auto-generate conversational data due to challenges in gathering human participation, they primarily rely on ChatGPT to simulate human behaviors based on directives rather than genuine human learning. This results in a limited scope, diminished diversity, and an absence of genuine multi-round conversational dynamics. To address the above issues, we innovatively target human questions extracted from genuine human-machine conversations as a learning goal and train a user simulator, UserGPT, to produce a high-quality human-centric synthetic conversation dataset, RealChat. Subsequently, this dataset trains our assistant model, ReaLM. Experimentally, ReaLM outpaces baseline models in both Vicuna-Bench and MT-Bench by pairwise comparison when considering equivalent training set sizes, and manual evaluation also shows that our model is highly competitive. Impressively, when fine-tuned with the latest LLaMA 2 model, ReaLM secured a leading score of 6.33 in the MT-Bench, outshining the contemporary same-scale models, including the LLaMA-2-7B-chat model. Further in-depth analysis demonstrates the scalability and transferability of our approach. A preliminary exploration into the interplay between training set data quality and resultant model performance is also undertaken, laying a robust groundwork for future investigations. The code is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/ReaLM.

Understanding cybercrime communications is paramount for cybersecurity defence. This often involves translating communications into English for processing, interpreting, and generating timely intelligence. The problem is that translation is hard. Human translation is slow, expensive, and scarce. Machine translation is inaccurate and biased. We propose using fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLM) to generate translations that can accurately capture the nuances of cybercrime language. We apply our technique to public chats from the NoName057(16) Russian-speaking hacktivist group. Our results show that our fine-tuned LLM model is better, faster, more accurate, and able to capture nuances of the language. Our method shows it is possible to achieve high-fidelity translations and significantly reduce costs by a factor ranging from 430 to 23,000 compared to a human translator.

AI-powered chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) require users to create an account using their email and phone number, thereby linking their personally identifiable information to their conversational data and usage patterns. As these chatbots are increasingly being used for tasks involving sensitive information, privacy concerns have been raised about how chatbot providers handle user data. To address these concerns, we present ProxyGPT, a privacy-enhancing system that enables anonymous queries in popular chatbot platforms. ProxyGPT leverages volunteer proxies to submit user queries on their behalf, thus providing network-level anonymity for chatbot users. The system is designed to support key security properties such as content integrity via TLS-backed data provenance, end-to-end encryption, and anonymous payment, while also ensuring usability and sustainability. We provide a thorough analysis of the privacy, security, and integrity of our system and identify various future research directions, particularly in the area of private chatbot query synthesis. Our human evaluation shows that ProxyGPT offers users a greater sense of privacy compared to traditional AI chatbots, especially in scenarios where users are hesitant to share their identity with chatbot providers. Although our proof-of-concept has higher latency than popular chatbots, our human interview participants consider this to be an acceptable trade-off for anonymity. To the best of our knowledge, ProxyGPT is the first comprehensive proxy-based solution for privacy-preserving AI chatbots. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/dzungvpham/proxygpt.

In today's digital age, the internet is essential for communication and the sharing of information, creating a critical need for sophisticated data security measures to prevent unauthorized access and exploitation. Cryptography encrypts messages into a cipher text that is incomprehensible to unauthorized readers, thus safeguarding data during its transmission. Steganography, on the other hand, originates from the Greek term for "covered writing" and involves the art of hiding data within another medium, thereby facilitating covert communication by making the message invisible. This proposed approach takes advantage of the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL), especially through the application of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), to improve upon traditional steganographic methods. By embedding encrypted data within another medium, our method ensures that the communication remains hidden from prying eyes. The application of GANs enables a smart, secure system that utilizes the inherent sensitivity of neural networks to slight alterations in data, enhancing the protection against detection. By merging the encryption techniques of cryptography with the hiding capabilities of steganography, and augmenting these with the strengths of AI, we introduce a comprehensive security system designed to maintain both the privacy and integrity of information. This system is crafted not just to prevent unauthorized access or modification of data, but also to keep the existence of the data hidden. This fusion of technologies tackles the core challenges of data security in the current era of open digital communication, presenting an advanced solution with the potential to transform the landscape of information security.

Large language models and AI chatbots have been at the forefront of democratizing artificial intelligence. However, the releases of ChatGPT and other similar tools have been followed by growing concerns regarding the difficulty of controlling large language models and their outputs. Currently, we are witnessing a cat-and-mouse game where users attempt to misuse the models with a novel attack called prompt injections. In contrast, the developers attempt to discover the vulnerabilities and block the attacks simultaneously. In this paper, we provide an overview of these emergent threats and present a categorization of prompt injections, which can guide future research on prompt injections and act as a checklist of vulnerabilities in the development of LLM interfaces. Moreover, based on previous literature and our own empirical research, we discuss the implications of prompt injections to LLM end users, developers, and researchers.

Because "out-of-the-box" large language models are capable of generating a great deal of objectionable content, recent work has focused on aligning these models in an attempt to prevent undesirable generation. While there has been some success at circumventing these measures -- so-called "jailbreaks" against LLMs -- these attacks have required significant human ingenuity and are brittle in practice. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective attack method that causes aligned language models to generate objectionable behaviors. Specifically, our approach finds a suffix that, when attached to a wide range of queries for an LLM to produce objectionable content, aims to maximize the probability that the model produces an affirmative response (rather than refusing to answer). However, instead of relying on manual engineering, our approach automatically produces these adversarial suffixes by a combination of greedy and gradient-based search techniques, and also improves over past automatic prompt generation methods. Surprisingly, we find that the adversarial prompts generated by our approach are quite transferable, including to black-box, publicly released LLMs. Specifically, we train an adversarial attack suffix on multiple prompts (i.e., queries asking for many different types of objectionable content), as well as multiple models (in our case, Vicuna-7B and 13B). When doing so, the resulting attack suffix is able to induce objectionable content in the public interfaces to ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude, as well as open source LLMs such as LLaMA-2-Chat, Pythia, Falcon, and others. In total, this work significantly advances the state-of-the-art in adversarial attacks against aligned language models, raising important questions about how such systems can be prevented from producing objectionable information. Code is available at github.com/llm-attacks/llm-attacks.

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, they pose potential safety concerns, such as the ``jailbreak'' problem, wherein malicious instructions can manipulate LLMs to exhibit undesirable behavior. Although several preventive measures have been developed to mitigate the potential risks associated with LLMs, they have primarily focused on English data. In this study, we reveal the presence of multilingual jailbreak challenges within LLMs and consider two potential risk scenarios: unintentional and intentional. The unintentional scenario involves users querying LLMs using non-English prompts and inadvertently bypassing the safety mechanisms, while the intentional scenario concerns malicious users combining malicious instructions with multilingual prompts to deliberately attack LLMs. The experimental results reveal that in the unintentional scenario, the rate of unsafe content increases as the availability of languages decreases. Specifically, low-resource languages exhibit three times the likelihood of encountering harmful content compared to high-resource languages, with both ChatGPT and GPT-4. In the intentional scenario, multilingual prompts can exacerbate the negative impact of malicious instructions, with astonishingly high rates of unsafe output: 80.92\% for ChatGPT and 40.71\% for GPT-4. To handle such a challenge in the multilingual context, we propose a novel Self-Defense framework that automatically generates multilingual training data for safety fine-tuning. Experimental results show that ChatGPT fine-tuned with such data can achieve a substantial reduction in unsafe content generation. Data is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multilingual-safety-for-LLMs. Warning: This paper contains examples with potentially harmful content.

The proliferation of phishing sites and emails poses significant challenges to existing cybersecurity efforts. Despite advances in malicious email filters and email security protocols, problems with oversight and false positives persist. Users often struggle to understand why emails are flagged as potentially fraudulent, risking the possibility of missing important communications or mistakenly trusting deceptive phishing emails. This study introduces ChatSpamDetector, a system that uses large language models (LLMs) to detect phishing emails. By converting email data into a prompt suitable for LLM analysis, the system provides a highly accurate determination of whether an email is phishing or not. Importantly, it offers detailed reasoning for its phishing determinations, assisting users in making informed decisions about how to handle suspicious emails. We conducted an evaluation using a comprehensive phishing email dataset and compared our system to several LLMs and baseline systems. We confirmed that our system using GPT-4 has superior detection capabilities with an accuracy of 99.70%. Advanced contextual interpretation by LLMs enables the identification of various phishing tactics and impersonations, making them a potentially powerful tool in the fight against email-based phishing threats.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) become ever more dominant, classic pre-trained word embeddings sustain their relevance through computational efficiency and nuanced linguistic interpretation. Drawing from recent studies demonstrating that the convergence of GloVe and word2vec optimizations all tend towards log-co-occurrence matrix variants, we construct a novel word representation system called Bit-cipher that eliminates the need of backpropagation while leveraging contextual information and hyper-efficient dimensionality reduction techniques based on unigram frequency, providing strong interpretability, alongside efficiency. We use the bit-cipher algorithm to train word vectors via a two-step process that critically relies on a hyperparameter -- bits -- that controls the vector dimension. While the first step trains the bit-cipher, the second utilizes it under two different aggregation modes -- summation or concatenation -- to produce contextually rich representations from word co-occurrences. We extend our investigation into bit-cipher's efficacy, performing probing experiments on part-of-speech (POS) tagging and named entity recognition (NER) to assess its competitiveness with classic embeddings like word2vec and GloVe. Additionally, we explore its applicability in LM training and fine-tuning. By replacing embedding layers with cipher embeddings, our experiments illustrate the notable efficiency of cipher in accelerating the training process and attaining better optima compared to conventional training paradigms. Experiments on the integration of bit-cipher embedding layers with Roberta, T5, and OPT, prior to or as a substitute for fine-tuning, showcase a promising enhancement to transfer learning, allowing rapid model convergence while preserving competitive performance.

The advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them invaluable across various applications, from conversational agents and content creation to data analysis, research, and innovation. However, their effectiveness and accessibility also render them susceptible to abuse for generating malicious content, including phishing attacks. This study explores the potential of using four popular commercially available LLMs - ChatGPT (GPT 3.5 Turbo), GPT 4, Claude and Bard to generate functional phishing attacks using a series of malicious prompts. We discover that these LLMs can generate both phishing emails and websites that can convincingly imitate well-known brands, and also deploy a range of evasive tactics for the latter to elude detection mechanisms employed by anti-phishing systems. Notably, these attacks can be generated using unmodified, or "vanilla," versions of these LLMs, without requiring any prior adversarial exploits such as jailbreaking. As a countermeasure, we build a BERT based automated detection tool that can be used for the early detection of malicious prompts to prevent LLMs from generating phishing content attaining an accuracy of 97\% for phishing website prompts, and 94\% for phishing email prompts.

Large language models (LLMs) have profoundly transformed natural language applications, with a growing reliance on instruction-based definitions for designing chatbots. However, post-deployment the chatbot definitions are fixed and are vulnerable to attacks by malicious users, emphasizing the need to prevent unethical applications and financial losses. Existing studies explore user prompts' impact on LLM-based chatbots, yet practical methods to contain attacks on application-specific chatbots remain unexplored. This paper presents System Prompt Meta Language (SPML), a domain-specific language for refining prompts and monitoring the inputs to the LLM-based chatbots. SPML actively checks attack prompts, ensuring user inputs align with chatbot definitions to prevent malicious execution on the LLM backbone, optimizing costs. It also streamlines chatbot definition crafting with programming language capabilities, overcoming natural language design challenges. Additionally, we introduce a groundbreaking benchmark with 1.8k system prompts and 20k user inputs, offering the inaugural language and benchmark for chatbot definition evaluation. Experiments across datasets demonstrate SPML's proficiency in understanding attacker prompts, surpassing models like GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and LLAMA. Our data and codes are publicly available at: https://prompt-compiler.github.io/SPML/.

Pornographic content occurring in human-machine interaction dialogues can cause severe side effects for users in open-domain dialogue systems. However, research on detecting pornographic language within human-machine interaction dialogues is an important subject that is rarely studied. To advance in this direction, we introduce CensorChat, a dialogue monitoring dataset aimed at detecting whether the dialogue session contains pornographic content. To this end, we collect real-life human-machine interaction dialogues in the wild and break them down into single utterances and single-turn dialogues, with the last utterance spoken by the chatbot. We propose utilizing knowledge distillation of large language models to annotate the dataset. Specifically, first, the raw dataset is annotated by four open-source large language models, with the majority vote determining the label. Second, we use ChatGPT to update the empty label from the first step. Third, to ensure the quality of the validation and test sets, we utilize GPT-4 for label calibration. If the current label does not match the one generated by GPT-4, we employ a self-criticism strategy to verify its correctness. Finally, to facilitate the detection of pornographic text, we develop a series of text classifiers using a pseudo-labeled dataset. Detailed data analysis demonstrates that leveraging knowledge distillation techniques with large language models provides a practical and cost-efficient method for developing pornographic text detectors.

Chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT are now serving millions of users. Despite their widespread use, there remains a lack of public datasets showcasing how these tools are used by a population of users in practice. To bridge this gap, we offered free access to ChatGPT for online users in exchange for their affirmative, consensual opt-in to anonymously collect their chat transcripts and request headers. From this, we compiled WildChat, a corpus of 1 million user-ChatGPT conversations, which consists of over 2.5 million interaction turns. We compare WildChat with other popular user-chatbot interaction datasets, and find that our dataset offers the most diverse user prompts, contains the largest number of languages, and presents the richest variety of potentially toxic use-cases for researchers to study. In addition to timestamped chat transcripts, we enrich the dataset with demographic data, including state, country, and hashed IP addresses, alongside request headers. This augmentation allows for more detailed analysis of user behaviors across different geographical regions and temporal dimensions. Finally, because it captures a broad range of use cases, we demonstrate the dataset's potential utility in fine-tuning instruction-following models. WildChat is released at https://wildchat.allen.ai under AI2 ImpACT Licenses.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Bard, have revolutionized natural language understanding and generation. They possess deep language comprehension, human-like text generation capabilities, contextual awareness, and robust problem-solving skills, making them invaluable in various domains (e.g., search engines, customer support, translation). In the meantime, LLMs have also gained traction in the security community, revealing security vulnerabilities and showcasing their potential in security-related tasks. This paper explores the intersection of LLMs with security and privacy. Specifically, we investigate how LLMs positively impact security and privacy, potential risks and threats associated with their use, and inherent vulnerabilities within LLMs. Through a comprehensive literature review, the paper categorizes the papers into "The Good" (beneficial LLM applications), "The Bad" (offensive applications), and "The Ugly" (vulnerabilities of LLMs and their defenses). We have some interesting findings. For example, LLMs have proven to enhance code security (code vulnerability detection) and data privacy (data confidentiality protection), outperforming traditional methods. However, they can also be harnessed for various attacks (particularly user-level attacks) due to their human-like reasoning abilities. We have identified areas that require further research efforts. For example, Research on model and parameter extraction attacks is limited and often theoretical, hindered by LLM parameter scale and confidentiality. Safe instruction tuning, a recent development, requires more exploration. We hope that our work can shed light on the LLMs' potential to both bolster and jeopardize cybersecurity.

Large language model systems face important security risks from maliciously crafted messages that aim to overwrite the system's original instructions or leak private data. To study this problem, we organized a capture-the-flag competition at IEEE SaTML 2024, where the flag is a secret string in the LLM system prompt. The competition was organized in two phases. In the first phase, teams developed defenses to prevent the model from leaking the secret. During the second phase, teams were challenged to extract the secrets hidden for defenses proposed by the other teams. This report summarizes the main insights from the competition. Notably, we found that all defenses were bypassed at least once, highlighting the difficulty of designing a successful defense and the necessity for additional research to protect LLM systems. To foster future research in this direction, we compiled a dataset with over 137k multi-turn attack chats and open-sourced the platform.

Conversational large language models are fine-tuned for both instruction-following and safety, resulting in models that obey benign requests but refuse harmful ones. While this refusal behavior is widespread across chat models, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we show that refusal is mediated by a one-dimensional subspace, across 13 popular open-source chat models up to 72B parameters in size. Specifically, for each model, we find a single direction such that erasing this direction from the model's residual stream activations prevents it from refusing harmful instructions, while adding this direction elicits refusal on even harmless instructions. Leveraging this insight, we propose a novel white-box jailbreak method that surgically disables refusal with minimal effect on other capabilities. Finally, we mechanistically analyze how adversarial suffixes suppress propagation of the refusal-mediating direction. Our findings underscore the brittleness of current safety fine-tuning methods. More broadly, our work showcases how an understanding of model internals can be leveraged to develop practical methods for controlling model behavior.

Recent advancements in the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily focused on mitigating attacks crafted in natural language or in common encryption techniques like Base64. However, new models which often possess better reasoning capabilities, open the door to new attack vectors that were previously non-existent in older models. This seems counter-intuitive at first glance, but these advanced models can decipher more complex cryptic queries that previous models could not, making them susceptible to attacks using such prompts. To exploit this vulnerability, we propose Attacks using Custom Encryptions (ACE), a novel method to jailbreak LLMs by leveraging custom encryption schemes. We evaluate the effectiveness of ACE on four state-of-the-art LLMs, achieving Attack Success Rates (ASR) of up to 66% on close-source models and 88% on open-source models. Building upon this, we introduce Layered Attacks using Custom Encryptions (LACE), which employs multiple layers of encryption through our custom ciphers to further enhance the ASR. Our findings demonstrate that LACE significantly enhances the ability to jailbreak LLMs, increasing the ASR of GPT-4o from 40% to 78%, a 38% improvement. Our results highlight that the advanced capabilities of LLMs introduce unforeseen vulnerabilities to complex attacks. Specifically complex and layered ciphers increase the chance of jailbreaking.

Question-and-answer agents like ChatGPT offer a novel tool for use as a potential honeypot interface in cyber security. By imitating Linux, Mac, and Windows terminal commands and providing an interface for TeamViewer, nmap, and ping, it is possible to create a dynamic environment that can adapt to the actions of attackers and provide insight into their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). The paper illustrates ten diverse tasks that a conversational agent or large language model might answer appropriately to the effects of command-line attacker. The original result features feasibility studies for ten model tasks meant for defensive teams to mimic expected honeypot interfaces with minimal risks. Ultimately, the usefulness outside of forensic activities stems from whether the dynamic honeypot can extend the time-to-conquer or otherwise delay attacker timelines short of reaching key network assets like databases or confidential information. While ongoing maintenance and monitoring may be required, ChatGPT's ability to detect and deflect malicious activity makes it a valuable option for organizations seeking to enhance their cyber security posture. Future work will focus on cybersecurity layers, including perimeter security, host virus detection, and data security.

Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ``learning'' from demonstrations). However, disentangling these the two modes remains a challenging goal. We introduce ICL CIPHERS, a class of task reformulations based on substitution ciphers borrowed from classic cryptography. In this approach, a subset of tokens in the in-context inputs are substituted with other (irrelevant) tokens, rendering English sentences less comprehensible to human eye. However, by design, there is a latent, fixed pattern to this substitution, making it reversible. This bijective (reversible) cipher ensures that the task remains a well-defined task in some abstract sense, despite the transformations. It is a curious question if LLMs can solve ICL CIPHERS with a BIJECTIVE mapping, which requires deciphering the latent cipher. We show that LLMs are better at solving ICL CIPHERS with BIJECTIVE mappings than the NON-BIJECTIVE (irreversible) baseline, providing a novel approach to quantify ``learning'' in ICL. While this gap is small, it is consistent across the board on four datasets and six models. Finally, we examine LLMs' internal representations and identify evidence in their ability to decode the ciphered inputs.

Impressive progress has been made on chat models based on Large Language Models (LLMs) recently; however, there is a noticeable lag in multi-turn conversations between open-source chat models (e.g., Alpaca and Vicuna) and the leading chat models (e.g., ChatGPT and GPT-4). Through a series of analyses, we attribute the lag to the lack of enough high-quality multi-turn instruction-tuning data. The available instruction-tuning data for the community are either single-turn conversations or multi-turn ones with certain issues, such as non-human-like instructions, less detailed responses, or rare topic shifts. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing Parrot, a highly scalable solution designed to automatically generate high-quality instruction-tuning data, which are then used to enhance the effectiveness of chat models in multi-turn conversations. Specifically, we start by training the Parrot-Ask model, which is designed to emulate real users in generating instructions. We then utilize Parrot-Ask to engage in multi-turn conversations with ChatGPT across a diverse range of topics, resulting in a collection of 40K high-quality multi-turn dialogues (Parrot-40K). These data are subsequently employed to train a chat model that we have named Parrot-Chat. We demonstrate that the dialogues gathered from Parrot-Ask markedly outperform existing multi-turn instruction-following datasets in critical metrics, including topic diversity, number of turns, and resemblance to human conversation. With only 40K training examples, Parrot-Chat achieves strong performance against other 13B open-source models across a range of instruction-following benchmarks, and particularly excels in evaluations of multi-turn capabilities. We make all codes, datasets, and two versions of the Parrot-Ask model based on LLaMA2-13B and KuaiYii-13B available at https://github.com/kwai/KwaiYii/Parrot.

We introduce a cryptographic method to hide an arbitrary secret payload in the response of a Large Language Model (LLM). A secret key is required to extract the payload from the model's response, and without the key it is provably impossible to distinguish between the responses of the original LLM and the LLM that hides a payload. In particular, the quality of generated text is not affected by the payload. Our approach extends a recent result of Christ, Gunn and Zamir (2023) who introduced an undetectable watermarking scheme for LLMs.

Interacting with human via high-quality multi-turn dialogues is a key feature of large language models (LLMs). However, human-based evaluation of such capability involves intensive manual labor. This report provides a preliminary evaluation of existing large language models for human-style multi-turn chatting, through an LLM-based approach. We start from real-world human dialogues and keep the very first utterances as the ChatSEED. Then we prompt LLMs to generate a full multi-turn dialogue (tens of utterances) based on the ChatSEED, utterance by utterance. Finally, we adopt state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4, \etc) as the judge to evaluate the generated dialogues. With different evaluation protocols, we come to substantially identical conclusions. We find that GPT-4 can generate human-style multi-turn dialogues with impressive quality, significantly outperforms its counterparts. It's difficult for a discriminator to distinguish between GPT-4 generated dialogues and human dialogues. In contrast, other LLMs struggle to generate multi-turn dialogues of satisfactory quality due to poor instruction-following capability, tendency to generate lengthy utterances, or limited general capability. All data and codes will be provided in https://github.com/open-compass/BotChat/ and we hope they can serve as a valuable resource for evaluating multi-turn chatting capabilities of LLMs.

We study interactive learning of language agents based on user edits made to the agent's output. In a typical setting such as writing assistants, the user interacts with a language agent to generate a response given a context, and may optionally edit the agent response to personalize it based on their latent preference, in addition to improving the correctness. The edit feedback is naturally generated, making it a suitable candidate for improving the agent's alignment with the user's preference, and for reducing the cost of user edits over time. We propose a learning framework, PRELUDE that infers a description of the user's latent preference based on historic edit data and using it to define a prompt policy that drives future response generation. This avoids fine-tuning the agent, which is costly, challenging to scale with the number of users, and may even degrade its performance on other tasks. Furthermore, learning descriptive preference improves interpretability, allowing the user to view and modify the learned preference. However, user preference can be complex and vary based on context, making it challenging to learn. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm named CIPHER that leverages a large language model (LLM) to infer the user preference for a given context based on user edits. In the future, CIPHER retrieves inferred preferences from the k-closest contexts in the history, and forms an aggregate preference for response generation. We introduce two interactive environments -- summarization and email writing, for evaluation using a GPT-4 simulated user. We compare with algorithms that directly retrieve user edits but do not learn descriptive preference, and algorithms that learn context-agnostic preference. On both tasks, CIPHER achieves the lowest edit distance cost and learns preferences that show significant similarity to the ground truth preferences

Numerous companies have started offering services based on large language models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, which inevitably raises privacy concerns as users' prompts are exposed to the model provider. Previous research on secure reasoning using multi-party computation (MPC) has proven to be impractical for LLM applications due to its time-consuming and communication-intensive nature. While lightweight anonymization techniques can protect private information in prompts through substitution or masking, they fail to recover sensitive data replaced in the LLM-generated results. In this paper, we expand the application scenarios of anonymization techniques by training a small local model to de-anonymize the LLM's returned results with minimal computational overhead. We introduce the HaS framework, where "H(ide)" and "S(eek)" represent its two core processes: hiding private entities for anonymization and seeking private entities for de-anonymization, respectively. To quantitatively assess HaS's privacy protection performance, we propose both black-box and white-box adversarial models. Furthermore, we conduct experiments to evaluate HaS's usability in translation and classification tasks. The experimental findings demonstrate that the HaS framework achieves an optimal balance between privacy protection and utility.

Security of model parameters and user data is critical for Transformer-based services, such as ChatGPT. While recent strides in secure two-party protocols have successfully addressed security concerns in serving Transformer models, their adoption is practically infeasible due to the prohibitive cryptographic overheads involved. Drawing insights from our hands-on experience in developing two real-world Transformer-based services, we identify the inherent efficiency bottleneck in the two-party assumption. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel three-party threat model. Within this framework, we design a semi-symmetric permutation-based protection scheme and present STIP, the first secure Transformer inference protocol without any inference accuracy loss. Experiments on representative Transformer models in real systems show that STIP has practical security and outperforms state-of-the-art secure two-party protocols in efficiency by millions of times.

Role-playing chatbots built on large language models have drawn interest, but better techniques are needed to enable mimicking specific fictional characters. We propose an algorithm that controls language models via an improved prompt and memories of the character extracted from scripts. We construct ChatHaruhi, a dataset covering 32 Chinese / English TV / anime characters with over 54k simulated dialogues. Both automatic and human evaluations show our approach improves role-playing ability over baselines. Code and data are available at https://github.com/LC1332/Chat-Haruhi-Suzumiya .

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened up new opportunities across various domains and applications; yet it also presents challenges related to potential misuse. To mitigate such risks, red teaming has been employed as a proactive security measure to probe language models for harmful outputs via jailbreak attacks. However, current jailbreak attack approaches are single-turn with explicit malicious queries that do not fully capture the complexity of real-world interactions. In reality, users can engage in multi-turn interactions with LLM-based chat assistants, allowing them to conceal their true intentions in a more covert manner. To bridge this gap, we, first, propose a new jailbreak approach, RED QUEEN ATTACK. This method constructs a multi-turn scenario, concealing the malicious intent under the guise of preventing harm. We craft 40 scenarios that vary in turns and select 14 harmful categories to generate 56k multi-turn attack data points. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the RED QUEEN ATTACK with four representative LLM families of different sizes. Our experiments reveal that all LLMs are vulnerable to RED QUEEN ATTACK, reaching 87.62% attack success rate on GPT-4o and 75.4% on Llama3-70B. Further analysis reveals that larger models are more susceptible to the RED QUEEN ATTACK, with multi-turn structures and concealment strategies contributing to its success. To prioritize safety, we introduce a straightforward mitigation strategy called RED QUEEN GUARD, which aligns LLMs to effectively counter adversarial attacks. This approach reduces the attack success rate to below 1% while maintaining the model's performance across standard benchmarks. Full implementation and dataset are publicly accessible at https://github.com/kriti-hippo/red_queen.

Large language models like ChatGPT have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, enabling various applications including translation, essay writing, and chit-chatting. However, there is a concern that they can be misused for malicious purposes, such as fraud or denial-of-service attacks. Therefore, it is crucial to develop methods for detecting whether the party involved in a conversation is a bot or a human. In this paper, we propose a framework named FLAIR, Finding Large language model Authenticity via a single Inquiry and Response, to detect conversational bots in an online manner. Specifically, we target a single question scenario that can effectively differentiate human users from bots. The questions are divided into two categories: those that are easy for humans but difficult for bots (e.g., counting, substitution, positioning, noise filtering, and ASCII art), and those that are easy for bots but difficult for humans (e.g., memorization and computation). Our approach shows different strengths of these questions in their effectiveness, providing a new way for online service providers to protect themselves against nefarious activities and ensure that they are serving real users. We open-sourced our dataset on https://github.com/hongwang600/FLAIR and welcome contributions from the community to enrich such detection datasets.

This paper presents our efforts to democratize ChatGPT across language. We release a large language model "Phoenix", achieving competitive performance among open-source English and Chinese models while excelling in languages with limited resources (covering both Latin and non-Latin languages). We believe this work will be beneficial to make ChatGPT more accessible, especially in countries where people cannot use ChatGPT due to restrictions from OpenAI or local goverments. Our data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/LLMZoo.

Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have demonstrated vast potential but also introduce challenges related to content constraints and potential misuse. Our study investigates three key research questions: (1) the number of different prompt types that can jailbreak LLMs, (2) the effectiveness of jailbreak prompts in circumventing LLM constraints, and (3) the resilience of ChatGPT against these jailbreak prompts. Initially, we develop a classification model to analyze the distribution of existing prompts, identifying ten distinct patterns and three categories of jailbreak prompts. Subsequently, we assess the jailbreak capability of prompts with ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4.0, utilizing a dataset of 3,120 jailbreak questions across eight prohibited scenarios. Finally, we evaluate the resistance of ChatGPT against jailbreak prompts, finding that the prompts can consistently evade the restrictions in 40 use-case scenarios. The study underscores the importance of prompt structures in jailbreaking LLMs and discusses the challenges of robust jailbreak prompt generation and prevention.

Chat models (i.e. language models trained to follow instructions through conversation with humans) outperform base models (i.e. trained solely on unlabeled data) in both conversation and general task-solving abilities. These models are generally English-centric and require further adaptation for languages that are underrepresented in or absent from their training data. A common technique for adapting base models is to extend the model's vocabulary with target language tokens, i.e. vocabulary expansion (VE), and then continually pre-train it on language-specific data. Using chat data is ideal for chat model adaptation, but often, either this does not exist or is costly to construct. Alternatively, adapting chat models with unlabeled data is a possible solution, but it could result in catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using unlabeled target language data for VE on chat models for the first time. We first show that off-the-shelf VE generally performs well across target language tasks and models in 71% of cases, though it underperforms in scenarios where source chat models are already strong. To further improve adapted models, we propose post-hoc techniques that inject information from the source model without requiring any further training. Experiments reveal the effectiveness of our methods, helping the adapted models to achieve performance improvements in 87% of cases.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into various applications. The functionalities of recent LLMs can be flexibly modulated via natural language prompts. This renders them susceptible to targeted adversarial prompting, e.g., Prompt Injection (PI) attacks enable attackers to override original instructions and employed controls. So far, it was assumed that the user is directly prompting the LLM. But, what if it is not the user prompting? We argue that LLM-Integrated Applications blur the line between data and instructions. We reveal new attack vectors, using Indirect Prompt Injection, that enable adversaries to remotely (without a direct interface) exploit LLM-integrated applications by strategically injecting prompts into data likely to be retrieved. We derive a comprehensive taxonomy from a computer security perspective to systematically investigate impacts and vulnerabilities, including data theft, worming, information ecosystem contamination, and other novel security risks. We demonstrate our attacks' practical viability against both real-world systems, such as Bing's GPT-4 powered Chat and code-completion engines, and synthetic applications built on GPT-4. We show how processing retrieved prompts can act as arbitrary code execution, manipulate the application's functionality, and control how and if other APIs are called. Despite the increasing integration and reliance on LLMs, effective mitigations of these emerging threats are currently lacking. By raising awareness of these vulnerabilities and providing key insights into their implications, we aim to promote the safe and responsible deployment of these powerful models and the development of robust defenses that protect users and systems from potential attacks.

This paper studies extractable memorization: training data that an adversary can efficiently extract by querying a machine learning model without prior knowledge of the training dataset. We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT. Existing techniques from the literature suffice to attack unaligned models; in order to attack the aligned ChatGPT, we develop a new divergence attack that causes the model to diverge from its chatbot-style generations and emit training data at a rate 150x higher than when behaving properly. Our methods show practical attacks can recover far more data than previously thought, and reveal that current alignment techniques do not eliminate memorization.

ChatGPT is one of the most popular language models which achieve amazing performance on various natural language tasks. Consequently, there is also an urgent need to detect the texts generated ChatGPT from human written. One of the extensively studied methods trains classification models to distinguish both. However, existing studies also demonstrate that the trained models may suffer from distribution shifts (during test), i.e., they are ineffective to predict the generated texts from unseen language tasks or topics. In this work, we aim to have a comprehensive investigation on these methods' generalization behaviors under distribution shift caused by a wide range of factors, including prompts, text lengths, topics, and language tasks. To achieve this goal, we first collect a new dataset with human and ChatGPT texts, and then we conduct extensive studies on the collected dataset. Our studies unveil insightful findings which provide guidance for developing future methodologies or data collection strategies for ChatGPT detection.

To support software developers in finding and fixing software bugs, several automated program repair techniques have been introduced. Given a test suite, standard methods usually either synthesize a repair, or navigate a search space of software edits to find test-suite passing variants. Recent program repair methods are based on deep learning approaches. One of these novel methods, which is not primarily intended for automated program repair, but is still suitable for it, is ChatGPT. The bug fixing performance of ChatGPT, however, is so far unclear. Therefore, in this paper we evaluate ChatGPT on the standard bug fixing benchmark set, QuixBugs, and compare the performance with the results of several other approaches reported in the literature. We find that ChatGPT's bug fixing performance is competitive to the common deep learning approaches CoCoNut and Codex and notably better than the results reported for the standard program repair approaches. In contrast to previous approaches, ChatGPT offers a dialogue system through which further information, e.g., the expected output for a certain input or an observed error message, can be entered. By providing such hints to ChatGPT, its success rate can be further increased, fixing 31 out of 40 bugs, outperforming state-of-the-art.

Large language models have shown good performances in generating code to meet human requirements. However, human requirements expressed in natural languages can be vague, incomplete, and ambiguous, leading large language models to misunderstand human requirements and make mistakes. Worse, it is difficult for a human user to refine the requirement. To help human users refine their requirements and improve large language models' code generation performances, we propose ChatCoder: a method to refine the requirements via chatting with large language models. We design a chat scheme in which the large language models will guide the human users to refine their expression of requirements to be more precise, unambiguous, and complete than before. Experiments show that ChatCoder has improved existing large language models' performance by a large margin. Besides, ChatCoder has the advantage over refine-based methods and LLMs fine-tuned via human response.

We explore the self-play training procedure of large language models (LLMs) in a two-player adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo. In this game, an attacker and a defender communicate around a target word only visible to the attacker. The attacker aims to induce the defender to speak the target word unconsciously, while the defender tries to infer the target word from the attacker's utterances. To win the game, both players should have sufficient knowledge about the target word and high-level reasoning ability to infer and express in this information-reserved conversation. Hence, we are curious about whether LLMs' reasoning ability can be further enhanced by self-play in this adversarial language game (SPAG). With this goal, we select several open-source LLMs and let each act as the attacker and play with a copy of itself as the defender on an extensive range of target words. Through reinforcement learning on the game outcomes, we observe that the LLMs' performances uniformly improve on a broad range of reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, iteratively adopting this self-play process can continuously promote LLMs' reasoning abilities. The code is at https://github.com/Linear95/SPAG.

Recent large language models (LLMs) in the general domain, such as ChatGPT, have shown remarkable success in following instructions and producing human-like responses. However, such language models have not been learned individually and carefully for the medical domain, resulting in poor diagnostic accuracy and inability to give correct recommendations for medical diagnosis, medications, etc. To address this issue, we collected more than 700 diseases and their corresponding symptoms, recommended medications, and required medical tests, and then generated 5K doctor-patient conversations. By fine-tuning models of doctor-patient conversations, these models emerge with great potential to understand patients' needs, provide informed advice, and offer valuable assistance in a variety of medical-related fields. The integration of these advanced language models into healthcare can revolutionize the way healthcare professionals and patients communicate, ultimately improving the overall quality of care and patient outcomes. In addition, we will open all source code, datasets and model weights to advance the further development of dialogue models in the medical field. In addition, the training data, code, and weights of this project are available at: https://github.com/Kent0n-Li/ChatDoctor.

Chat models, such as ChatGPT, have shown impressive capabilities and have been rapidly adopted across numerous domains. However, these models are only accessible through a restricted API, creating barriers for new research and progress in the field. We propose a pipeline that can automatically generate a high-quality multi-turn chat corpus by leveraging ChatGPT to engage in a conversation with itself. Subsequently, we employ parameter-efficient tuning to enhance LLaMA, an open-source large language model. The resulting model, named Baize, demonstrates good performance in multi-turn dialogues with guardrails that minimize potential risks. The Baize models and data are released for research purposes only at https://github.com/project-baize/baize. An online demo is also available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/project-baize/baize-lora-7B.

NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content, in the context of a dialogue, can have severe side effects on users in open-domain dialogue systems. However, research on detecting NSFW language, especially sexually explicit content, within a dialogue context has significantly lagged behind. To address this issue, we introduce CensorChat, a dialogue monitoring dataset aimed at NSFW dialogue detection. Leveraging knowledge distillation techniques involving GPT-4 and ChatGPT, this dataset offers a cost-effective means of constructing NSFW content detectors. The process entails collecting real-life human-machine interaction data and breaking it down into single utterances and single-turn dialogues, with the chatbot delivering the final utterance. ChatGPT is employed to annotate unlabeled data, serving as a training set. Rationale validation and test sets are constructed using ChatGPT and GPT-4 as annotators, with a self-criticism strategy for resolving discrepancies in labeling. A BERT model is fine-tuned as a text classifier on pseudo-labeled data, and its performance is assessed. The study emphasizes the importance of AI systems prioritizing user safety and well-being in digital conversations while respecting freedom of expression. The proposed approach not only advances NSFW content detection but also aligns with evolving user protection needs in AI-driven dialogues.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. Due to their training on internet-sourced datasets, LLMs can sometimes generate objectionable content, necessitating extensive alignment with human feedback to avoid such outputs. Despite massive alignment efforts, LLMs remain susceptible to adversarial jailbreak attacks, which usually are manipulated prompts designed to circumvent safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses. Here, we introduce a novel approach, Directed Rrepresentation Optimization Jailbreak (DROJ), which optimizes jailbreak prompts at the embedding level to shift the hidden representations of harmful queries towards directions that are more likely to elicit affirmative responses from the model. Our evaluations on LLaMA-2-7b-chat model show that DROJ achieves a 100\% keyword-based Attack Success Rate (ASR), effectively preventing direct refusals. However, the model occasionally produces repetitive and non-informative responses. To mitigate this, we introduce a helpfulness system prompt that enhances the utility of the model's responses. Our code is available at https://github.com/Leon-Leyang/LLM-Safeguard.

The recently released ChatGPT has demonstrated surprising abilities in natural language understanding and natural language generation. Machine translation relies heavily on the abilities of language understanding and generation. Thus, in this paper, we explore how to assist machine translation with ChatGPT. We adopt several translation prompts on a wide range of translations. Our experimental results show that ChatGPT with designed translation prompts can achieve comparable or better performance over commercial translation systems for high-resource language translations. We further evaluate the translation quality using multiple references, and ChatGPT achieves superior performance compared to commercial systems. We also conduct experiments on domain-specific translations, the final results show that ChatGPT is able to comprehend the provided domain keyword and adjust accordingly to output proper translations. At last, we perform few-shot prompts that show consistent improvement across different base prompts. Our work provides empirical evidence that ChatGPT still has great potential in translations.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, including chatbot assistants and code generation, aligning their behavior with safety and ethical standards has become paramount. However, jailbreak attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs, threaten LLMs' safety significantly. In this paper, we introduce Layer-AdvPatcher, a novel methodology designed to defend against jailbreak attacks by utilizing an unlearning strategy to patch specific layers within LLMs through self-augmented datasets. Our insight is that certain layer(s), tend to produce affirmative tokens when faced with harmful prompts. By identifying these layers and adversarially exposing them to generate more harmful data, one can understand their inherent and diverse vulnerabilities to attacks. With these exposures, we then "unlearn" these issues, reducing the impact of affirmative tokens and hence minimizing jailbreak risks while keeping the model's responses to safe queries intact. We conduct extensive experiments on two models, four benchmark datasets, and multiple state-of-the-art jailbreak benchmarks to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Results indicate that our framework reduces the harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to recent defense methods.

With an evergrowing number of LLMs reporting superlative performance for English, their ability to perform equitably for different dialects of English (i.e., dialect robustness) needs to be ascertained. Specifically, we use English language (US English or Indian English) conversations between humans who play the word-guessing game of `taboo'. We formulate two evaluative tasks: target word prediction (TWP) (i.e.predict the masked target word in a conversation) and target word selection (TWS) (i.e., select the most likely masked target word in a conversation, from among a set of candidate words). Extending MD3, an existing dialectic dataset of taboo-playing conversations, we introduce M-MD3, a target-word-masked version of MD3 with the USEng and IndEng subsets. We add two subsets: AITrans (where dialectic information is removed from IndEng) and AIGen (where LLMs are prompted to generate conversations). Our evaluation uses pre-trained and fine-tuned versions of two closed-source (GPT-4/3.5) and two open-source LLMs (Mistral and Gemma). LLMs perform significantly better for US English than Indian English for both TWP and TWS, for all settings. While GPT-based models perform the best, the comparatively smaller models work more equitably for short conversations (<8 turns). Our results on AIGen and AITrans (the best and worst-performing subset) respectively show that LLMs may learn a dialect of their own based on the composition of the training data, and that dialect robustness is indeed a challenging task. Our evaluation methodology exhibits a novel way to examine attributes of language models using pre-existing dialogue datasets.

Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language, and reader discretion is recommended. The increasing open release of powerful large language models (LLMs) has facilitated the development of downstream applications by reducing the essential cost of data annotation and computation. To ensure AI safety, extensive safety-alignment measures have been conducted to armor these models against malicious use (primarily hard prompt attack). However, beneath the seemingly resilient facade of the armor, there might lurk a shadow. By simply tuning on 100 malicious examples with 1 GPU hour, these safely aligned LLMs can be easily subverted to generate harmful content. Formally, we term a new attack as Shadow Alignment: utilizing a tiny amount of data can elicit safely-aligned models to adapt to harmful tasks without sacrificing model helpfulness. Remarkably, the subverted models retain their capability to respond appropriately to regular inquiries. Experiments across 8 models released by 5 different organizations (LLaMa-2, Falcon, InternLM, BaiChuan2, Vicuna) demonstrate the effectiveness of shadow alignment attack. Besides, the single-turn English-only attack successfully transfers to multi-turn dialogue and other languages. This study serves as a clarion call for a collective effort to overhaul and fortify the safety of open-source LLMs against malicious attackers.

The misuse of large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention from the general public and LLM vendors. In response, efforts have been made to align LLMs with human values and intent use. However, a particular type of adversarial prompts, known as jailbreak prompt, has emerged and continuously evolved to bypass the safeguards and elicit harmful content from LLMs. In this paper, we conduct the first measurement study on jailbreak prompts in the wild, with 6,387 prompts collected from four platforms over six months. Leveraging natural language processing technologies and graph-based community detection methods, we discover unique characteristics of jailbreak prompts and their major attack strategies, such as prompt injection and privilege escalation. We also observe that jailbreak prompts increasingly shift from public platforms to private ones, posing new challenges for LLM vendors in proactive detection. To assess the potential harm caused by jailbreak prompts, we create a question set comprising 46,800 samples across 13 forbidden scenarios. Our experiments show that current LLMs and safeguards cannot adequately defend jailbreak prompts in all scenarios. Particularly, we identify two highly effective jailbreak prompts which achieve 0.99 attack success rates on ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) and GPT-4, and they have persisted online for over 100 days. Our work sheds light on the severe and evolving threat landscape of jailbreak prompts. We hope our study can facilitate the research community and LLM vendors in promoting safer and regulated LLMs.

Studying how people interact with large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios is increasingly important due to their widespread use in various applications. In this paper, we introduce LMSYS-Chat-1M, a large-scale dataset containing one million real-world conversations with 25 state-of-the-art LLMs. This dataset is collected from 210K unique IP addresses in the wild on our Vicuna demo and Chatbot Arena website. We offer an overview of the dataset's content, including its curation process, basic statistics, and topic distribution, highlighting its diversity, originality, and scale. We demonstrate its versatility through four use cases: developing content moderation models that perform similarly to GPT-4, building a safety benchmark, training instruction-following models that perform similarly to Vicuna, and creating challenging benchmark questions. We believe that this dataset will serve as a valuable resource for understanding and advancing LLM capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m.

Despite efforts to align large language models to produce harmless responses, they are still vulnerable to jailbreak prompts that elicit unrestricted behaviour. In this work, we investigate persona modulation as a black-box jailbreaking method to steer a target model to take on personalities that are willing to comply with harmful instructions. Rather than manually crafting prompts for each persona, we automate the generation of jailbreaks using a language model assistant. We demonstrate a range of harmful completions made possible by persona modulation, including detailed instructions for synthesising methamphetamine, building a bomb, and laundering money. These automated attacks achieve a harmful completion rate of 42.5% in GPT-4, which is 185 times larger than before modulation (0.23%). These prompts also transfer to Claude 2 and Vicuna with harmful completion rates of 61.0% and 35.9%, respectively. Our work reveals yet another vulnerability in commercial large language models and highlights the need for more comprehensive safeguards.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, are designed to provide useful and safe responses. However, adversarial prompts known as 'jailbreaks' can circumvent safeguards, leading LLMs to generate potentially harmful content. Exploring jailbreak prompts can help to better reveal the weaknesses of LLMs and further steer us to secure them. Unfortunately, existing jailbreak methods either suffer from intricate manual design or require optimization on other white-box models, which compromises either generalization or efficiency. In this paper, we generalize jailbreak prompt attacks into two aspects: (1) Prompt Rewriting and (2) Scenario Nesting. Based on this, we propose ReNeLLM, an automatic framework that leverages LLMs themselves to generate effective jailbreak prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReNeLLM significantly improves the attack success rate while greatly reducing the time cost compared to existing baselines. Our study also reveals the inadequacy of current defense methods in safeguarding LLMs. Finally, we analyze the failure of LLMs defense from the perspective of prompt execution priority, and propose corresponding defense strategies. We hope that our research can catalyze both the academic community and LLMs developers towards the provision of safer and more regulated LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/ReNeLLM.

Software engineering is a domain characterized by intricate decision-making processes, often relying on nuanced intuition and consultation. Recent advancements in deep learning have started to revolutionize software engineering practices through elaborate designs implemented at various stages of software development. In this paper, we present an innovative paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) throughout the entire software development process, streamlining and unifying key processes through natural language communication, thereby eliminating the need for specialized models at each phase. At the core of this paradigm lies ChatDev, a virtual chat-powered software development company that mirrors the established waterfall model, meticulously dividing the development process into four distinct chronological stages: designing, coding, testing, and documenting. Each stage engages a team of agents, such as programmers, code reviewers, and test engineers, fostering collaborative dialogue and facilitating a seamless workflow. The chat chain acts as a facilitator, breaking down each stage into atomic subtasks. This enables dual roles, allowing for proposing and validating solutions through context-aware communication, leading to efficient resolution of specific subtasks. The instrumental analysis of ChatDev highlights its remarkable efficacy in software generation, enabling the completion of the entire software development process in under seven minutes at a cost of less than one dollar. It not only identifies and alleviates potential vulnerabilities but also rectifies potential hallucinations while maintaining commendable efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The potential of ChatDev unveils fresh possibilities for integrating LLMs into the realm of software development.

With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), many downstream NLP tasks can be well solved given appropriate prompts. Though model developers and researchers work hard on dialog safety to avoid generating harmful content from LLMs, it is still challenging to steer AI-generated content (AIGC) for the human good. As powerful LLMs are devouring existing text data from various domains (e.g., GPT-3 is trained on 45TB texts), it is natural to doubt whether the private information is included in the training data and what privacy threats can these LLMs and their downstream applications bring. In this paper, we study the privacy threats from OpenAI's ChatGPT and the New Bing enhanced by ChatGPT and show that application-integrated LLMs may cause new privacy threats. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments to support our claims and discuss LLMs' privacy implications.

Recently, ChatGPT has emerged as a powerful NLP tool that can carry out several tasks. However, the range of languages ChatGPT can handle remains largely a mystery. In this work, we investigate ChatGPT's language identification abilities. For this purpose, we compile Babel-670, a benchmark comprising 670 languages representing 23 language families. Languages in Babel-670 run the gamut between the very high-resource to the very low-resource and are spoken in five continents. We then study ChatGPT's (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) ability to (i) identify both language names and language codes (ii) under both zero- and few-shot conditions (iii) with and without provision of label set. When compared to smaller finetuned language identification tools, we find that ChatGPT lags behind. Our empirical analysis shows the reality that ChatGPT still resides in a state of potential enhancement before it can sufficiently serve diverse communities.

Recent advances in interactive large language models like ChatGPT have revolutionized various domains; however, their behavior in natural and role-play conversation settings remains underexplored. In our study, we address this gap by deeply investigating how ChatGPT behaves during conversations in different settings by analyzing its interactions in both a normal way and a role-play setting. We introduce a novel dataset of broad range of human-AI conversations annotated with user motives and model naturalness to examine (i) how humans engage with the conversational AI model, and (ii) how natural are AI model responses. Our study highlights the diversity of user motives when interacting with ChatGPT and variable AI naturalness, showing not only the nuanced dynamics of natural conversations between humans and AI, but also providing new avenues for improving the effectiveness of human-AI communication.

This paper addresses the privacy and security concerns associated with deep neural language models, which serve as crucial components in various modern AI-based applications. These models are often used after being pre-trained and fine-tuned for specific tasks, with deployment on servers accessed through the internet. However, this introduces two fundamental risks: (a) the transmission of user inputs to the server via the network gives rise to interception vulnerabilities, and (b) privacy concerns emerge as organizations that deploy such models store user data with restricted context. To address this, we propose a novel method to adapt and fine-tune transformer-based language models on passkey-encrypted user-specific text. The original pre-trained language model first undergoes a quick adaptation (without any further pre-training) with a series of irreversible transformations applied to the tokenizer and token embeddings. This enables the model to perform inference on encrypted inputs while preventing reverse engineering of text from model parameters and intermediate outputs. After adaptation, models are fine-tuned on encrypted versions of existing training datasets. Experimental evaluation employing adapted versions of renowned models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) across established benchmark English and multilingual datasets for text classification and sequence labeling shows that encrypted models achieve performance parity with their original counterparts. This serves to safeguard performance, privacy, and security cohesively.

Our work tackles the challenge of securing user inputs in cloud-hosted large language model (LLM) serving while ensuring output invariance, model confidentiality, and compute efficiency. We introduce secure multi-party decoding (SMD), which leverages confidential computing to confine user prompts to a trusted execution environment (TEE), namely a confidential virtual machine (CVM), while allowing service providers to generate tokens efficiently. We also introduce a novel cryptographic method, prompt obfuscation (PO), to ensure robustness against reconstruction attacks on SMD. We demonstrate that our approach preserves both prompt confidentiality and LLM serving efficiency. Our solution can enable privacy-preserving cloud LLM serving that handles sensitive prompts, such as clinical records, financial data, and personal information.

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly permeate daily lives, there is a growing demand for real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. Traditional turn-based chat systems driven by LLMs prevent users from verbally interacting with the system while it is generating responses. To overcome these limitations, we adapt existing LLMs to duplex models so that these LLMs can listen for users while generating output and dynamically adjust themselves to provide users with instant feedback. % such as in response to interruptions. Specifically, we divide the queries and responses of conversations into several time slices and then adopt a time-division-multiplexing (TDM) encoding-decoding strategy to pseudo-simultaneously process these slices. Furthermore, to make LLMs proficient enough to handle real-time conversations, we build a fine-tuning dataset consisting of alternating time slices of queries and responses as well as covering typical feedback types in instantaneous interactions. Our experiments show that although the queries and responses of conversations are segmented into incomplete slices for processing, LLMs can preserve their original performance on standard benchmarks with a few fine-tuning steps on our dataset. Automatic and human evaluation indicate that duplex models make user-AI interactions more natural and human-like, and greatly improve user satisfaction compared to vanilla LLMs. Our duplex model and dataset will be released.

Multi-turn interactions with language models (LMs) pose critical safety risks, as harmful intent can be strategically spread across exchanges. Yet, the vast majority of prior work has focused on single-turn safety, while adaptability and diversity remain among the key challenges of multi-turn red-teaming. To address these challenges, we present X-Teaming, a scalable framework that systematically explores how seemingly harmless interactions escalate into harmful outcomes and generates corresponding attack scenarios. X-Teaming employs collaborative agents for planning, attack optimization, and verification, achieving state-of-the-art multi-turn jailbreak effectiveness and diversity with success rates up to 98.1% across representative leading open-weight and closed-source models. In particular, X-Teaming achieves a 96.2% attack success rate against the latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which has been considered nearly immune to single-turn attacks. Building on X-Teaming, we introduce XGuard-Train, an open-source multi-turn safety training dataset that is 20x larger than the previous best resource, comprising 30K interactive jailbreaks, designed to enable robust multi-turn safety alignment for LMs. Our work offers essential tools and insights for mitigating sophisticated conversational attacks, advancing the multi-turn safety of LMs.

The way users acquire information is undergoing a paradigm shift with the advent of ChatGPT. Unlike conventional search engines, ChatGPT retrieves knowledge from the model itself and generates answers for users. ChatGPT's impressive question-answering (QA) capability has attracted more than 100 million users within a short period of time but has also raised concerns regarding its reliability. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale measurement of ChatGPT's reliability in the generic QA scenario with a carefully curated set of 5,695 questions across ten datasets and eight domains. We find that ChatGPT's reliability varies across different domains, especially underperforming in law and science questions. We also demonstrate that system roles, originally designed by OpenAI to allow users to steer ChatGPT's behavior, can impact ChatGPT's reliability. We further show that ChatGPT is vulnerable to adversarial examples, and even a single character change can negatively affect its reliability in certain cases. We believe that our study provides valuable insights into ChatGPT's reliability and underscores the need for strengthening the reliability and security of large language models (LLMs).

The field of data visualisation has long aimed to devise solutions for generating visualisations directly from natural language text. Research in Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) has contributed towards the development of such techniques. However, the implementation of workable NLIs has always been challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language, as well as in consequence of unclear and poorly written user queries which pose problems for existing language models in discerning user intent. Instead of pursuing the usual path of developing new iterations of language models, this study uniquely proposes leveraging the advancements in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-3 to convert free-form natural language directly into code for appropriate visualisations. This paper presents a novel system, Chat2VIS, which takes advantage of the capabilities of LLMs and demonstrates how, with effective prompt engineering, the complex problem of language understanding can be solved more efficiently, resulting in simpler and more accurate end-to-end solutions than prior approaches. Chat2VIS shows that LLMs together with the proposed prompts offer a reliable approach to rendering visualisations from natural language queries, even when queries are highly misspecified and underspecified. This solution also presents a significant reduction in costs for the development of NLI systems, while attaining greater visualisation inference abilities compared to traditional NLP approaches that use hand-crafted grammar rules and tailored models. This study also presents how LLM prompts can be constructed in a way that preserves data security and privacy while being generalisable to different datasets. This work compares the performance of GPT-3, Codex and ChatGPT across a number of case studies and contrasts the performances with prior studies.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a new way to build chatbots by accepting natural language prompts. Yet, it is unclear how to design prompts to power chatbots to carry on naturalistic conversations while pursuing a given goal, such as collecting self-report data from users. We explore what design factors of prompts can help steer chatbots to talk naturally and collect data reliably. To this aim, we formulated four prompt designs with different structures and personas. Through an online study (N = 48) where participants conversed with chatbots driven by different designs of prompts, we assessed how prompt designs and conversation topics affected the conversation flows and users' perceptions of chatbots. Our chatbots covered 79% of the desired information slots during conversations, and the designs of prompts and topics significantly influenced the conversation flows and the data collection performance. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of building chatbots with LLMs.

We study suffix-based jailbreaksx2013a powerful family of attacks against large language models (LLMs) that optimize adversarial suffixes to circumvent safety alignment. Focusing on the widely used foundational GCG attack (Zou et al., 2023), we observe that suffixes vary in efficacy: some markedly more universalx2013generalizing to many unseen harmful instructionsx2013than others. We first show that GCG's effectiveness is driven by a shallow, critical mechanism, built on the information flow from the adversarial suffix to the final chat template tokens before generation. Quantifying the dominance of this mechanism during generation, we find GCG irregularly and aggressively hijacks the contextualization process. Crucially, we tie hijacking to the universality phenomenon, with more universal suffixes being stronger hijackers. Subsequently, we show that these insights have practical implications: GCG universality can be efficiently enhanced (up to times5 in some cases) at no additional computational cost, and can also be surgically mitigated, at least halving attack success with minimal utility loss. We release our code and data at http://github.com/matanbt/interp-jailbreak.

The introduction of ChatGPT has garnered widespread attention in both academic and industrial communities. ChatGPT is able to respond effectively to a wide range of human questions, providing fluent and comprehensive answers that significantly surpass previous public chatbots in terms of security and usefulness. On one hand, people are curious about how ChatGPT is able to achieve such strength and how far it is from human experts. On the other hand, people are starting to worry about the potential negative impacts that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT could have on society, such as fake news, plagiarism, and social security issues. In this work, we collected tens of thousands of comparison responses from both human experts and ChatGPT, with questions ranging from open-domain, financial, medical, legal, and psychological areas. We call the collected dataset the Human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus (HC3). Based on the HC3 dataset, we study the characteristics of ChatGPT's responses, the differences and gaps from human experts, and future directions for LLMs. We conducted comprehensive human evaluations and linguistic analyses of ChatGPT-generated content compared with that of humans, where many interesting results are revealed. After that, we conduct extensive experiments on how to effectively detect whether a certain text is generated by ChatGPT or humans. We build three different detection systems, explore several key factors that influence their effectiveness, and evaluate them in different scenarios. The dataset, code, and models are all publicly available at https://github.com/Hello-SimpleAI/chatgpt-comparison-detection.

Automated code generation can be a powerful technique for software development, significantly reducing developers' efforts and time required to create new code by generating it automatically based on requirements. Recently, OpenAI's language model ChatGPT has emerged as a powerful tool for generating human-like responses to a wide range of textual inputs (i.e., prompts), including those related to code generation. However, the effectiveness of ChatGPT for code generation is not well understood, and the generation performance could be heavily influenced by the choice of prompt. To answer these questions, we conducted experiments using the CodeXGlue dataset to evaluate ChatGPT's capabilities for two code generation tasks, including text-to-code and code-to-code generation. We designed prompts by leveraging the chain-of-thought strategy with multi-step optimizations. Our results showed that by carefully designing prompts to guide ChatGPT, the generation performance can be improved substantially. We also analyzed the factors that influenced the prompt design and provided insights that could guide future research.