Are aligned neural networks adversarially aligned?
Authors: name: Nicholas Carlini; name: Milad Nasr; name: Christopher A. Choquette-Choo; name: Matthew Jagielski; name: Irena Gao; name: Anas Awadalla; name: Pang Wei Koh; name: Daphne Ippolito; name: Katherine Lee; name: Florian Tramer; name: Ludwig Schmidt
Published: 2023-06-26 17:18:44

Abstract: Large language models are now tuned to align with the goals of their
creators, namely to be "helpful and harmless." These models should respond
helpfully to user questions, but refuse to answer requests that could cause
harm. However, adversarial users can construct inputs which circumvent attempts
at alignment. In this work, we study to what extent these models remain
aligned, even when interacting with an adversarial user who constructs
worst-case inputs (adversarial examples). These inputs are designed to cause
the model to emit harmful content that would otherwise be prohibited. We show
that existing NLP-based optimization attacks are insufficiently powerful to
reliably attack aligned text models: even when current NLP-based attacks fail,
we can find adversarial inputs with brute force. As a result, the failure of
current attacks should not be seen as proof that aligned text models remain
aligned under adversarial inputs.
  However the recent trend in large-scale ML models is multimodal models that
allow users to provide images that influence the text that is generated. We
show these models can be easily attacked, i.e., induced to perform arbitrary
un-aligned behavior through adversarial perturbation of the input image. We
conjecture that improved NLP attacks may demonstrate this same level of
adversarial control over text-only models.