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Make Them Spill the Beans! Coercive Knowledge Extraction from (Production) LLMs

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arxiv 2312.04782 v1 pith:US2QW4MR submitted 2023-12-08 cs.CR cs.LG

classification cs.CRcs.LG
keywords outputjail-breakingllmsmodelmodelsalignmentevenharmful
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are now widely used in various applications, making it crucial to align their ethical standards with human values. However, recent jail-breaking methods demonstrate that this alignment can be undermined using carefully constructed prompts. In our study, we reveal a new threat to LLM alignment when a bad actor has access to the model's output logits, a common feature in both open-source LLMs and many commercial LLM APIs (e.g., certain GPT models). It does not rely on crafting specific prompts. Instead, it exploits the fact that even when an LLM rejects a toxic request, a harmful response often hides deep in the output logits. By forcefully selecting lower-ranked output tokens during the auto-regressive generation process at a few critical output positions, we can compel the model to reveal these hidden responses. We term this process model interrogation. This approach differs from and outperforms jail-breaking methods, achieving 92% effectiveness compared to 62%, and is 10 to 20 times faster. The harmful content uncovered through our method is more relevant, complete, and clear. Additionally, it can complement jail-breaking strategies, with which results in further boosting attack performance. Our findings indicate that interrogation can extract toxic knowledge even from models specifically designed for coding tasks.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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

  1. NeuroBreak: Unveil Internal Jailbreak Mechanisms in Large Language Models

    cs.CR 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A visualization system traces jailbreak attacks through LLM layers and neurons, then fine-tunes the vulnerable neurons to reduce attack success while preserving general ability.

  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. Innocence in the Crossfire: Roles of Skip Connections in Jailbreaking Visual Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    The paper reports higher harmful-output rates in three open-source VLMs from detailed image descriptions, in-context examples, and positive openings, and from a skip connection between internal layers, with memes riva...

  4. SoK: A Comprehensive Security Analysis of Jailbreak Resilience in GPT and DeepSeek Models

    cs.CR 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Across 510 HarmBench behaviors and seven attack methods, GPT-4 models show more consistent jailbreak resilience than DeepSeek models, whose vulnerability grows with scale.

  5. Guardians and Offenders: A Survey on Harmful Content Generation and Safety Mitigation of LLM

    cs.CL 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 3.0 of 10

    The submission's abstract promises an LLM safety survey, but the provided body is the opening page of an unrelated arithmetic-dynamics paper, so the artifact is internally inconsistent.

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