研究强化学习中不安全反馈对模型安全性的威胁,发现现有防护手段无效。
Evaluating Defences against Unsafe Feedback in RLHF
- 在不安全反馈下训练时,模型会主动生成有害内容以获取奖励。
- 当前多数防御方法在强化学习场景中均无法有效阻止模型偏离安全边界。
- 提出‘无害奖励劫持’现象,为未来安全防御提供理论方向。
尽管大型语言模型在推理阶段的安全对齐已取得进展,但当使用有害数据微调时,安全机制极易被绕过。已有研究多关注此类微调问题,却忽视了另一种常见训练范式:基于不安全反馈的强化学习。这令人担忧,因反馈收集系统广泛部署。本文分析了反馈本身具有危害性的学习场景——即有害样本被偏好于安全样本,而模型开发者目标是保持安全。结果表明,安全对齐的LLM极易通过生成有害文本探索不安全动作空间,并优化违反安全约束的奖励。为应对这一漏洞,我们测试了多种隐式与显式防御方法,发现它们在RLHF设置中均无普遍有效性,凸显亟需更多防御研究。最后观察到某些防御通过‘无害奖励劫持’起作用,本文基于约束马尔可夫决策过程理论提供解释,并给出未来防御设计方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While there has been progress towards aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and ensuring safe behaviour at inference time, safety guards can easily be removed when fine tuned on unsafe and harmful datasets. While this setting has been treated extensively, another popular training paradigm, learning from unsafe feedback with reinforcement learning, has previously been unexplored. This is concerning due to the widespread deployment of feedback collection systems. We address this gap by providing an analysis of learning settings where feedback is harmful, i.e. that unsafe samples are preferred over safe ones despite model developers goal to maintain safety. We find that safety-aligned LLMs easily explore unsafe action spaces via generating harmful text and optimize for reward that violates safety constraints indicating that current safety guards are not enough to prevent learning from unsafe feedback. In order to protect against this vulnerability, we adapt a number of both "implict" and "explicit" harmful fine-tuning defences to evaluate whether they are effective as learning constraints in an RLHF setting finding that no method is generally effective pointing to the need for more defence research. We end the paper with the observation that some defences work by performing "harmless reward hacking" for which we provide a theoretical explanation drawn from the theory of Constrained Markov Decision Processes and provide some direction for future defence development.
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