Related papers: Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New …
Backdoor data poisoning, inserted within instruction examples used to fine-tune a foundation Large Language Model (LLM) for downstream tasks (\textit{e.g.,} sentiment prediction), is a serious security concern due to the evasive nature of…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…
Backdoors are hidden behaviors that are only triggered once an AI system has been deployed. Bad actors looking to create successful backdoors must design them to avoid activation during training and evaluation. Since data used in these…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where triggers embedded in poisoned samples can maliciously alter LLMs' behaviors. In this paper, we move beyond attacking LLMs and instead examine backdoor…
We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are…
Survey researchers face two key challenges: the rising costs of probability samples and missing data (e.g., non-response or attrition), which can undermine inference and increase the use of convenience samples. Recent work explores using…
Pre-trained general-purpose language models have been a dominating component in enabling real-world natural language processing (NLP) applications. However, a pre-trained model with backdoor can be a severe threat to the applications. Most…
Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for research. We show that narrow finetuning creates strong…
Large Language Models (LLMs), which bridge the gap between human language understanding and complex problem-solving, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot settings. Despite the…
In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to…
Finetuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can cause them to become emergently misaligned, giving stereotypically `evil' responses across diverse unrelated settings. Concerningly, a pre-registered survey of experts failed…
Low-rank approximation techniques have become the de facto standard for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their reduced computational and memory requirements. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these methods in…
Fine-tuning is a common and effective method for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specialized tasks and applications. In this paper, we study the privacy implications of fine-tuning LLMs on user data. To this end, we consider a…
Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…
We study behavioral self-awareness -- an LLM's ability to articulate its behaviors without requiring in-context examples. We finetune LLMs on datasets that exhibit particular behaviors, such as (a) making high-risk economic decisions, and…
Prior work shows that LLMs finetuned on malicious behaviors in a narrow domain (e.g., writing insecure code) can become broadly misaligned -- a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We investigate whether this extends from conventional…
Large language models are increasingly used as computational tools for modeling human-like behavior. We introduce a behavioral induction framework that modifies model policies through fine-tuning on structured decision-making tasks: using…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where inducing a bias toward a certain topic can have significant consequences, and backdoor attacks can be used to produce such models. Prior work on backdoor attacks has…
Stealthy data poisoning during fine-tuning can backdoor large language models (LLMs), threatening downstream safety. Existing detectors either use classifier-style probability signals--ill-suited to generation--or rely on rewriting, which…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being enhanced with the ability to use tools and to process multiple modalities. These new capabilities bring new benefits and also new security risks. In this work, we show that an attacker can use visual…