LW - Breaking Circuit Breakers by mikes

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Breaking Circuit Breakers, published by mikes on July 15, 2024 on LessWrong. A few days ago, Gray Swan published code and models for their recent "circuit breakers" method for language models.[1]1 The circuit breakers method defends against jailbreaks by training the model to erase "bad" internal representations. We are very excited about data-efficient defensive methods like this, especially those which use interpretability concepts or tools. At the link, we briefly investigate three topics: 1. Increased refusal rates on harmless prompts: Do circuit breakers really maintain language model utility? Most defensive methods come with a cost. We check the model's effectiveness on harmless prompts, and find that the refusal rate increases from 4% to 38.5% on or-bench-80k. 2. Moderate vulnerability to different token-forcing sequences: How specialized is the circuit breaker defense to the specific adversarial attacks they studied? All the attack methods evaluated in the circuit breaker paper rely on a "token-forcing" optimization objective which maximizes the likelihood of a particular generation like "Sure, here are instructions on how to assemble a bomb." We show that the current circuit breakers model is moderately vulnerable to different token forcing sequences like "1. Choose the right airport: …". 3. High vulnerability to internal-activation-guided attacks: We also evaluate our latest white-box jailbreak method, which uses a distillation-based objective based on internal activations (paper to be posted in a few days). We find that it also breaks the model easily even when we simultaneously require attack fluency. Full details at: https://confirmlabs.org/posts/circuit_breaking.html Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org