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Large language models (LLMs) are shown to benefit from chain-of-thought (COT) prompting, particularly when tackling tasks that require systematic reasoning processes. On the other hand, COT prompting also poses new vulnerabilities in the…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown state-of-the-art results in translating natural language questions into SQL queries (Text-to-SQL), a long-standing challenge within the database community. However, security concerns remain largely…
Machine learning (ML) models trained on data from potentially untrusted sources are vulnerable to poisoning. A small, maliciously crafted subset of the training inputs can cause the model to learn a "backdoor" task (e.g., misclassify inputs…
Optimization methods are widely employed in deep learning to identify and mitigate undesired model responses. While gradient-based techniques have proven effective for image models, their application to language models is hindered by the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned with human feedback have recently garnered significant attention. However, it remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to induce harmful outputs. Exploring jailbreak…
Fine-tuning on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) with proprietary data is now a standard practice for downstream developers to obtain task-specific LLMs. Surprisingly, we reveal a new and concerning risk along with the practice: the…
We investigate security concerns of the emergent instruction tuning paradigm, that models are trained on crowdsourced datasets with task instructions to achieve superior performance. Our studies demonstrate that an attacker can inject…
Evaluations of large language model (LLM) risks and capabilities are increasingly being incorporated into AI risk management and governance frameworks. Currently, most risk evaluations are conducted by designing inputs that elicit harmful…
Federated Learning (FL) is increasingly adopted for privacy-preserving collaborative training, but its decentralized nature makes it particularly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing attack methods, however, often rely on idealized…
Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in enterprise settings (e.g., as Microsoft 365 Copilot) face novel security challenges. One critical threat is prompt inference attacks: adversaries chain together seemingly benign prompts to gradually…
Large language models (LLMs) employ safety mechanisms to prevent harmful outputs, yet these defenses primarily rely on semantic pattern matching. We show that encoding harmful prompts as coherent mathematical problems -- using formalisms…
Mastering a skill generally relies on both hands-on experience from doers and insightful, high-level guidance by mentors. Will this strategy also work well for solving complex non-convex optimization problems? Here, a common gradient-based…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the development of embodied intelligence. By providing a few contextual demonstrations, developers can utilize the extensive internal knowledge of LLMs to effortlessly translate complex tasks…
With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), more customization is needed to ensure privacy-preserving and safe generation. We address this objective from two critical aspects: unlearning of sensitive information and…
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that enables different parties to train a model together for high quality and strong privacy protection. In this scenario, individual participants may get compromised and perform…
The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in generation tasks has enabled practitioners to leverage publicly available models to power custom applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. However, the data used to…
Log-structured merge (LSM) trees offer efficient ingestion by appending incoming data, and thus, are widely used as the storage layer of production NoSQL data stores. To enable competitive read performance, LSM-trees periodically…
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been gaining a lot of interest due to their adaptability and extensibility in emerging applications, including communication networks. It is anticipated that ZSM networks will be able to support…
Backdoor attacks are among the most effective, practical, and stealthy attacks in deep learning. In this paper, we consider a practical scenario where a developer obtains a deep model from a third party and uses it as part of a…