MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 73.07.01

Exploiting Limited Generalization of Safety Finetuning

Category: Jailbreaks and Prompt Injections Threaten Security of LLMs

Description

"Safety tuning is performed over a much narrower distribution compared to the pretraining distribution. This leaves the model vulnerable to attacks that exploit gaps in the generalization of the safety training, e.g. using encoded text (Wei et al., 2023c) or low-resource languages (Deng et al., 2023a; Yong et al., 2023) (see also Section 3.2)."

From Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Causal entity
Other
Timing
Other

Subdomain definition: Vulnerabilities in AI systems, software development toolchains, and hardware that can be exploited, resulting in unauthorized access, data and privacy breaches, or system manipulation causing unsafe outputs or behavior.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

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How other frameworks describe this risk

  • Privacy loss

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Model Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Hardware Vulnerabilities

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Network Devices

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Extraction Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Inference Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Poisoning Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Overhead Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

Other entries from Anwar2024