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Best-of-Venom: Attacking RLHF by Injecting Poisoned Preference Data

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arxiv 2404.05530 v2 pith:MSGLTVDH submitted 2024-04-08 cs.CL cs.AIcs.CRcs.LG

Best-of-Venom: Attacking RLHF by Injecting Poisoned Preference Data

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.CRcs.LG
keywords preferencepoisoningrlhfdatadatasetsinjectingpairspoisonous
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a popular method for aligning Language Models (LM) with human values and preferences. RLHF requires a large number of preference pairs as training data, which are often used in both the Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reward Model training and therefore publicly available datasets are commonly used. In this work, we study to what extent a malicious actor can manipulate the LMs generations by poisoning the preferences, i.e., injecting poisonous preference pairs into these datasets and the RLHF training process. We propose strategies to build poisonous preference pairs and test their performance by poisoning two widely used preference datasets. Our results show that preference poisoning is highly effective: injecting a small amount of poisonous data (1-5\% of the original dataset), we can effectively manipulate the LM to generate a target entity in a target sentiment (positive or negative). The findings from our experiments also shed light on strategies to defend against the preference poisoning attack.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

  1. Efficient Preference Poisoning Attack on Offline RLHF

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Label-flip attacks on log-linear DPO reduce to binary sparse approximation problems that can be solved efficiently by lattice-based and binary matching pursuit methods with recovery guarantees.

  2. Efficient Preference Poisoning Attack on Offline RLHF

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Preference poisoning against log-linear DPO reduces to a binary sparse approximation problem solved by lattice-reduction (BAL-A) and matching-pursuit (BMP-A) algorithms that carry recovery guarantees.

  3. Corruption-robust Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Introduces robust estimators for linear Markov games in offline MARLHF that achieve O(ε^{1-o(1)}) or O(√ε) bounds on Nash or CCE gaps under uniform or unilateral coverage.

  4. Be Kind, Rewrite: Benign Projections via Rewriting Defend Against LLM Data Poisoning Attacks

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    OBBR projects poisoned samples into benign space via rewriting with open-book examples, raising safety performance by 51% on average versus prior defenses across five attacks and four LLMs.

  5. BackFlush: Knowledge-Free Backdoor Detection and Elimination with Watermark Preservation in Large Language Models

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BackFlush detects backdoors via susceptibility amplification and eliminates them with RoPE unlearning to reach 1% ASR and 99% clean accuracy while preserving watermarks.

  6. LLM Hypnosis: Exploiting User Feedback for Unauthorized Knowledge Injection to All Users

    cs.CL 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A single attacker can use strategic upvoting and downvoting on language model outputs to inject facts, security flaws, or fake news that persist in the model for all users after preference tuning.

  7. Reframing AGI Confrontation with Off Earth Autonomy

    cs.CY 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    An off-Earth autonomy pathway can reduce AGI confrontation incentives by making early cooperation preferable to power-seeking on Earth.