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The Butterfly Effect of Altering Prompts: How Small Changes and Jailbreaks Affect Large Language Model Performance

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arxiv 2401.03729 v3 pith:WYG3VHJL submitted 2024-01-08 cs.CL cs.AI

The Butterfly Effect of Altering Prompts: How Small Changes and Jailbreaks Affect Large Language Model Performance

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords promptanswerdatallmsacrosschangefindjailbreaks
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are regularly being used to label data across many domains and for myriad tasks. By simply asking the LLM for an answer, or ``prompting,'' practitioners are able to use LLMs to quickly get a response for an arbitrary task. This prompting is done through a series of decisions by the practitioner, from simple wording of the prompt, to requesting the output in a certain data format, to jailbreaking in the case of prompts that address more sensitive topics. In this work, we ask: do variations in the way a prompt is constructed change the ultimate decision of the LLM? We answer this using a series of prompt variations across a variety of text classification tasks. We find that even the smallest of perturbations, such as adding a space at the end of a prompt, can cause the LLM to change its answer. Further, we find that requesting responses in XML and commonly used jailbreaks can have cataclysmic effects on the data labeled by LLMs.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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