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Prompts have evil twins

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arxiv 2311.07064 v3 pith:NFOPMADR submitted 2023-11-13 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords promptseviltwinsmodelsnatural-languageapplicationsbecausebehavior
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We discover that many natural-language prompts can be replaced by corresponding prompts that are unintelligible to humans but that provably elicit similar behavior in language models. We call these prompts "evil twins" because they are obfuscated and uninterpretable (evil), but at the same time mimic the functionality of the original natural-language prompts (twins). Remarkably, evil twins transfer between models. We find these prompts by solving a maximum-likelihood problem which has applications of independent interest.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Prompt Compression via Activation Aggregation

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A learned weighted sum of intermediate-layer activations compresses an instruction prompt into a single patch vector that, injected at an early layer, recovers task accuracy within ~2% of the full prompt.

  2. Layer-Wise Perturbations via Sparse Autoencoders for Adversarial Text Generation

    cs.CL 2025-08 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    Sparse autoencoder activation perturbation (SFPF) applied on top of existing jailbreak prompts raises attack success rate on Qwen3-32B, but with no defense evaluation and weak reproducibility.

  3. Generative Language Models Potential for Requirement Engineering Applications: Insights into Current Strengths and Limitations

    cs.SE 2024-12 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    ChatGPT and Gemini generally underperform task-specific models on requirements engineering benchmarks, except ChatGPT achieves a new top F1 score on the REQuestA question answering dataset.

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