Decoding Compressed Trust: Scrutinizing the Trustworthiness of Efficient LLMs Under Compression

Compressing high-capability Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a favored strategy for resource-efficient inferences. While state-of-the-art (SoTA) compression methods boast impressive advancements in preserving benign task performance, the potential risks of compression in terms of safety and trustworthiness have been largely neglected. This study conducts the first, thorough evaluation of three (3) leading LLMs using five (5) SoTA compression techniques across eight (8) trustworthiness dimensions. Our experiments highlight the intricate interplay between compression and trustworthiness, revealing some interesting patterns. We find that quantization is currently a more effective approach than pruning in achieving efficiency and trustworthiness simultaneously. For instance, a 4-bit quantized model retains the trustworthiness of its original counterpart, but model pruning significantly degrades trustworthiness, even at 50% sparsity. Moreover, employing quantization within a moderate bit range could unexpectedly improve certain trustworthiness dimensions such as ethics and fairness. Conversely, extreme quantization to very low bit levels (3 bits) tends to significantly reduce trustworthiness. This increased risk cannot be uncovered by looking at benign performance alone, in turn, mandating comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation in practice. These findings culminate in practical recommendations for simultaneously achieving high utility, efficiency, and trustworthiness in LLMs. Models and code are available at https://decoding-comp-trust.github.io/.

Shake to Leak: Fine-tuning Diffusion Models Can Amplify the Generative Privacy Risk

While diffusion models have recently demonstrated remarkable progress in generating realistic images, privacy risks also arise: published models or APIs could generate training images and thus leak privacy-sensitive training information. In this paper, we reveal a new risk, Shake-to-Leak (S2L), that fine-tuning the pre-trained models with manipulated data can amplify the existing privacy risks. We demonstrate that S2L could occur in various standard fine-tuning strategies for diffusion models, including concept-injection methods (DreamBooth and Textual Inversion) and parameter-efficient methods (LoRA and Hypernetwork), as well as their combinations. In the worst case, S2L can amplify the state-of-the-art membership inference attack (MIA) on diffusion models by $5.4\%$ (absolute difference) AUC and can increase extracted private samples from almost $0$ samples to $16.3$ samples on average per target domain. This discovery underscores that the privacy risk with diffusion models is even more severe than previously recognized. Codes are available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/Shake-to-Leak.

On the Generalization Ability of Unsupervised Pretraining

Recent advances in unsupervised learning have shown that unsupervised pre-training, followed by fine-tuning, can improve model generalization. However, a rigorous understanding of how the representation function learned on an unlabeled dataset affects the generalization of the fine-tuned model is lacking. Existing theoretical research does not adequately account for the heterogeneity of the distribution and tasks in pre-training and fine-tuning stage. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a novel theoretical framework that illuminates the critical factor influencing the transferability of knowledge acquired during unsupervised pre-training to the subsequent fine-tuning phase, ultimately affecting the generalization capabilities of the fine-tuned model on downstream tasks. We apply our theoretical framework to analyze generalization bound of two distinct scenarios: Context Encoder pre-training with deep neural networks and Masked Autoencoder pre-training with deep transformers, followed by fine-tuning on a binary classification task. Finally, inspired by our findings, we propose a novel regularization method during pre-training to further enhances the generalization of fine-tuned model. Overall, our results contribute to a better understanding of unsupervised pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, and can shed light on the design of more effective pre-training algorithms.

Revisiting Zeroth-Order Optimization for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning: A Benchmark

In the evolving landscape of natural language processing (NLP), fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with first-order (FO) optimizers like SGD and Adam has become standard. Yet, as LLMs grow {in size}, the substantial memory overhead from back-propagation (BP) for FO gradient computation presents a significant challenge. Addressing this issue is crucial, especially for applications like on-device training where memory efficiency is paramount. This paper proposes a shift towards BP-free, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization as a solution for reducing memory costs during LLM fine-tuning, building on the initial concept introduced by MeZO. Unlike traditional ZO-SGD methods, our work expands the exploration to a wider array of ZO optimization techniques, through a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind benchmarking study across five LLM families (Roberta, OPT, LLaMA, Vicuna, Mistral), three task complexities, and five fine-tuning schemes. Our study unveils previously overlooked optimization principles, highlighting the importance of task alignment, the role of the forward gradient method, and the balance between algorithm complexity and fine-tuning performance. We further introduce novel enhancements to ZO optimization, including block-wise descent, hybrid training, and gradient sparsity. Our study offers a promising direction for achieving further memory-efficient LLM fine-tuning. Codes to reproduce all our experiments are at https://github.com/ZO-Bench/ZO-LLM .

DP-OPT: Make Large Language Model Your Privacy-Preserving Prompt Engineer

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as dominant tools for various tasks, particularly when tailored for a specific target by prompt tuning. Nevertheless, concerns surrounding data privacy present obstacles due to the tuned prompts' dependency on sensitive private information. A practical solution is to host a local LLM and optimize a soft prompt privately using data. Yet, hosting a local model becomes problematic when model ownership is protected. Alternative methods, like sending data to the model's provider for training, intensify these privacy issues facing an untrusted provider. In this paper, we present a novel solution called Differentially-Private Offsite Prompt Tuning (DP-OPT) to address this challenge. Our approach involves tuning a discrete prompt on the client side and then applying it to the desired cloud models. We demonstrate that prompts suggested by LLMs themselves can be transferred without compromising performance significantly. To ensure that the prompts do not leak private information, we introduce the first private prompt generation mechanism, by a differentially-private (DP) ensemble of in-context learning with private demonstrations. With DP-OPT, generating privacy-preserving prompts by Vicuna-7b can yield competitive performance compared to non-private in-context learning on GPT3.5 or local private prompt tuning. Codes are available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/DP-OPT .

Understanding Deep Gradient Leakage via Inversion Influence Functions

Deep Gradient Leakage (DGL) is a highly effective attack that recovers private training images from gradient vectors. This attack casts significant privacy challenges on distributed learning from clients with sensitive data, where clients are required to share gradients. Defending against such attacks requires but lacks an understanding of when and how privacy leakage happens, mostly because of the black-box nature of deep networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Inversion Influence Function (I$^2$F) that establishes a closed-form connection between the recovered images and the private gradients by implicitly solving the DGL problem. Compared to directly solving DGL, I$^2$F is scalable for analyzing deep networks, requiring only oracle access to gradients and Jacobian-vector products. We empirically demonstrate that I$^2$F effectively approximated the DGL generally on different model architectures, datasets, attack implementations, and noise-based defenses. With this novel tool, we provide insights into effective gradient perturbation directions, the unfairness of privacy protection, and privacy-preferred model initialization. Our codes are provided in https://github.com/illidanlab/inversion-influence-function.

Safe and Robust Watermark Injection with a Single OoD Image

Training a high-performance deep neural network requires large amounts of data and computational resources. Protecting the intellectual property (IP) and commercial ownership of a deep model is challenging yet increasingly crucial. A major stream of watermarking strategies implants verifiable backdoor triggers by poisoning training samples, but these are often unrealistic due to data privacy and safety concerns and are vulnerable to minor model changes such as fine-tuning. To overcome these challenges, we propose a safe and robust backdoor-based watermark injection technique that leverages the diverse knowledge from a single out-of-distribution (OoD) image, which serves as a secret key for IP verification. The independence of training data makes it agnostic to third-party promises of IP security. We induce robustness via random perturbation of model parameters during watermark injection to defend against common watermark removal attacks, including fine-tuning, pruning, and model extraction. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking approach is not only time- and sample-efficient without training data, but also robust against the watermark removal attacks above.

FedNoisy: Federated Noisy Label Learning Benchmark

Federated learning has gained popularity for distributed learning without aggregating sensitive data from clients. But meanwhile, the distributed and isolated nature of data isolation may be complicated by data quality, making it more vulnerable to noisy labels. Many efforts exist to defend against the negative impacts of noisy labels in centralized or federated settings. However, there is a lack of a benchmark that comprehensively considers the impact of noisy labels in a wide variety of typical FL settings. In this work, we serve the first standardized benchmark that can help researchers fully explore potential federated noisy settings. Also, we conduct comprehensive experiments to explore the characteristics of these data settings and unravel challenging scenarios on the federated noisy label learning, which may guide method development in the future. We highlight the 20 basic settings for more than 5 datasets proposed in our benchmark and standardized simulation pipeline for federated noisy label learning. We hope this benchmark can facilitate idea verification in federated learning with noisy labels. \texttt{FedNoisy} is available at \codeword{https://github.com/SMILELab-FL/FedNoisy}.

Revisiting Data-Free Knowledge Distillation with Poisoned Teachers

Data-free knowledge distillation (KD) helps transfer knowledge from a pre-trained model (known as the teacher model) to a smaller model (known as the student model) without access to the original training data used for training the teacher model. However, the security of the synthetic or out-of-distribution (OOD) data required in data-free KD is largely unknown and under-explored. In this work, we make the first effort to uncover the security risk of data-free KD w.r.t. untrusted pre-trained models. We then propose Anti-Backdoor Data-Free KD (ABD), the first plug-in defensive method for data-free KD methods to mitigate the chance of potential backdoors being transferred. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed ABD in diminishing transferred backdoor knowledge while maintaining compatible downstream performances as the vanilla KD. We envision this work as a milestone for alarming and mitigating the potential backdoors in data-free KD. Codes are released at https://github.com/illidanlab/ABD.

On the Hardness of Robustness Transfer: A Perspective from Rademacher Complexity over Symmetric Difference Hypothesis Space

Recent studies demonstrated that the adversarially robust learning under $\ell_\infty$ attack is harder to generalize to different domains than standard domain adaptation. How to transfer robustness across different domains has been a key question in domain adaptation field. To investigate the fundamental difficulty behind adversarially robust domain adaptation (or robustness transfer), we propose to analyze a key complexity measure that controls the cross-domain generalization: the adversarial Rademacher complexity over {\em symmetric difference hypothesis space} $\mathcal{H} \Delta \mathcal{H}$. For linear models, we show that adversarial version of this complexity is always greater than the non-adversarial one, which reveals the intrinsic hardness of adversarially robust domain adaptation. We also establish upper bounds on this complexity measure. Then we extend them to the ReLU neural network class by upper bounding the adversarial Rademacher complexity in the binary classification setting. Finally, even though the robust domain adaptation is provably harder, we do find positive relation between robust learning and standard domain adaptation. We explain \emph{how adversarial training helps domain adaptation in terms of standard risk}. We believe our results initiate the study of the generalization theory of adversarially robust domain adaptation, and could shed lights on distributed adversarially robust learning from heterogeneous sources, e.g., federated learning scenario.