发现大模型隐含危险后门,且易被随机搜索触发
On the Hardness of Junking LLMs

- 用贪心随机搜索法寻找能触发有害输出的自然词元序列
- 该任务比传统越狱攻击更难,但成功率仍很高
- 揭示模型训练中隐含危险模式,适合安全研究者关注
大型语言模型易受越狱攻击,通常依赖精心设计的提示。近期发现,即使无恶意指令,仅通过优化的词元序列也能诱发有害行为,暗示训练中存在自然后门。本文首次系统研究此类‘垃圾化’问题,将目标定义为最大化生成特定有害前缀的概率。提出贪心随机搜索方法评估其可解性。结果表明该问题比标准越狱攻击更难,但简单策略即可高成功率解决,证明自然后门存在且易恢复。困惑度分析显示这些序列位于模型分布的低概率区域,支持其在训练中隐式形成。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) are known to be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which typically rely on carefully designed prompts containing explicit semantic structure. These attacks generally operate by fixing an adversarial instruction and optimizing small adversarial components (e.g., suffixes or prefixes). In this setting, prompt structure is fundamental for performance, and recent results show that even simple random search can achieve strong performance when combined with sophisticated prompt design. Recently, it has been observed that harmful behaviors can be elicited even without the adversarial prompt, relying solely on optimized token sequences. This suggests the existence of natural backdoors, i.e., token sequences naturally emerged during LLMs training that trigger unsafe outputs without any meaningful instruction. However, despite these observations, this setting remains largely unexplored, and in particular the hardness of finding natural backdoors has not been assessed yet. In this work, we provide a first proof-of-concept study investigating the hardness of this task, which we refer to as the junking problem. We formalize it as the problem of finding token sequences that maximize the probability of generating a target prefix of harmful responses, propose a greedy random-search method to assess is such sequences can be discovered easily. Our results show that this problem is harder than standard jailbreak attacks, confirming the importance of semantic information in prompt design. At the same time, we find that our simple strategy is sufficient to solve it with a high success rate, suggesting that natural backdoors are present and easily recoverable. Finally, through perplexity analysis, we observe that the discovered token sequences lie in low-probability regions of the model distribution, supporting the hypothesis that they emerged implicitly from the training process.
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