REVIEW 5 cited by
Is poisoning a real threat to LLM alignment? Maybe more so than you think
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Is poisoning a real threat to LLM alignment? Maybe more so than you think
read the original abstract
Recent advancements in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) have significantly impacted the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). The sensitivity of reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has led to new line work on Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which treats RLHF in a supervised learning framework. The increased practical use of these RLHF methods warrants an analysis of their vulnerabilities. In this work, we investigate the vulnerabilities of DPO to poisoning attacks under different scenarios and compare the effectiveness of preference poisoning, a first of its kind. We comprehensively analyze DPO's vulnerabilities under different types of attacks, i.e., backdoor and non-backdoor attacks, and different poisoning methods across a wide array of language models, i.e., LLama 7B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma 7B. We find that unlike PPO-based methods, which, when it comes to backdoor attacks, require at least 4\% of the data to be poisoned to elicit harmful behavior, we exploit the true vulnerabilities of DPO more simply so we can poison the model with only as much as 0.5\% of the data. We further investigate the potential reasons behind the vulnerability and how well this vulnerability translates into backdoor vs non-backdoor attacks.
Forward citations
Cited by 5 Pith papers
-
Loss Landscape Poisoning: Targeted Extraction of Unseen Training Data from LLMs
Poisoning training data reshapes the loss landscape to enable targeted extraction of unseen data from LLMs with high success rates in language and vision-language models.
-
BadDLM: Backdooring Diffusion Language Models with Diverse Targets
BadDLM implants effective backdoors in diffusion language models across concept, attribute, alignment, and payload targets by exploiting denoising dynamics while preserving clean performance.
-
Teach a Reward Model to Correct Itself: Reward Guided Adversarial Failure Discovery for Robust Reward Modeling
REFORM uses reward-guided controlled decoding to generate adversarial failures and augments training data to improve reward model robustness on preference datasets.
-
LLM Hypnosis: Exploiting User Feedback for Unauthorized Knowledge Injection to All Users
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.
-
FedDetox: Robust Federated SLM Alignment via On-Device Data Sanitization
FedDetox uses on-device knowledge-distilled classifiers to sanitize toxic data in federated SLM training, preserving safety alignment comparable to centralized baselines.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.