GenQA: Generating Millions of Instructions from a Handful of Prompts

Most public instruction finetuning datasets are relatively small compared to the closed source datasets used to train industry models. To study questions about finetuning at scale, such as curricula and learning rate cooldown schedules, there is a need for industrial-scale datasets. However, this scale necessitates a data generation process that is almost entirely automated. In this work, we study methods for generating large instruction datasets from a single prompt. With little human oversight, we get LLMs to write diverse sets of instruction examples ranging from simple completion tasks to complex multi-turn dialogs across a variety of subject areas. When finetuning a Llama-3 8B base model, our dataset meets or exceeds both WizardLM and Ultrachat on both knowledge-intensive leaderboard tasks as well as conversational evaluations. We release our dataset, the "generator" prompts that created it, and our finetuned model checkpoints.

Be like a Goldfish, Don't Memorize! Mitigating Memorization in Generative LLMs

Large language models can memorize and repeat their training data, causing privacy and copyright risks. To mitigate memorization, we introduce a subtle modification to the next-token training objective that we call the goldfish loss. During training, a randomly sampled subset of tokens are excluded from the loss computation. These dropped tokens are not memorized by the model, which prevents verbatim reproduction of a complete chain of tokens from the training set. We run extensive experiments training billion-scale Llama-2 models, both pre-trained and trained from scratch, and demonstrate significant reductions in extractable memorization with little to no impact on downstream benchmarks.

Is Synthetic Image Useful for Transfer Learning? An Investigation into Data Generation, Volume, and Utilization

Synthetic image data generation represents a promising avenue for training deep learning models, particularly in the realm of transfer learning, where obtaining real images within a specific domain can be prohibitively expensive due to privacy and intellectual property considerations. This work delves into the generation and utilization of synthetic images derived from text-to-image generative models in facilitating transfer learning paradigms. Despite the high visual fidelity of the generated images, we observe that their naive incorporation into existing real-image datasets does not consistently enhance model performance due to the inherent distribution gap between synthetic and real images. To address this issue, we introduce a novel two-stage framework called bridged transfer, which initially employs synthetic images for fine-tuning a pre-trained model to improve its transferability and subsequently uses real data for rapid adaptation. Alongside, We propose dataset style inversion strategy to improve the stylistic alignment between synthetic and real images. Our proposed methods are evaluated across 10 different datasets and 5 distinct models, demonstrating consistent improvements, with up to 30% accuracy increase on classification tasks. Intriguingly, we note that the enhancements were not yet saturated, indicating that the benefits may further increase with an expanded volume of synthetic data.

Privacy Backdoors: Enhancing Membership Inference through Poisoning Pre-trained Models

It is commonplace to produce application-specific models by fine-tuning large pre-trained models using a small bespoke dataset. The widespread availability of foundation model checkpoints on the web poses considerable risks, including the vulnerability to backdoor attacks. In this paper, we unveil a new vulnerability: the privacy backdoor attack. This black-box privacy attack aims to amplify the privacy leakage that arises when fine-tuning a model: when a victim fine-tunes a backdoored model, their training data will be leaked at a significantly higher rate than if they had fine-tuned a typical model. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets and models, including both vision-language models (CLIP) and large language models, demonstrating the broad applicability and effectiveness of such an attack. Additionally, we carry out multiple ablation studies with different fine-tuning methods and inference strategies to thoroughly analyze this new threat. Our findings highlight a critical privacy concern within the machine learning community and call for a reevaluation of safety protocols in the use of open-source pre-trained models.

Coercing LLMs to do and reveal anything

It has recently been shown that adversarial attacks on large language models (LLMs) can "jailbreak" the model into making harmful statements. In this work, we argue that the spectrum of adversarial attacks on LLMs is much larger than merely jailbreaking. We provide a broad overview of possible attack surfaces and attack goals. Based on a series of concrete examples, we discuss, categorize and systematize attacks that coerce varied unintended behaviors, such as misdirection, model control, denial-of-service, or data extraction. We analyze these attacks in controlled experiments, and find that many of them stem from the practice of pre-training LLMs with coding capabilities, as well as the continued existence of strange "glitch" tokens in common LLM vocabularies that should be removed for security reasons.

Benchmarking the Robustness of Image Watermarks

This paper investigates the weaknesses of image watermarking techniques. We present WAVES (Watermark Analysis Via Enhanced Stress-testing), a novel benchmark for assessing watermark robustness, overcoming the limitations of current evaluation methods.WAVES integrates detection and identification tasks, and establishes a standardized evaluation protocol comprised of a diverse range of stress tests. The attacks in WAVES range from traditional image distortions to advanced and novel variations of diffusive, and adversarial attacks. Our evaluation examines two pivotal dimensions: the degree of image quality degradation and the efficacy of watermark detection after attacks. We develop a series of Performance vs. Quality 2D plots, varying over several prominent image similarity metrics, which are then aggregated in a heuristically novel manner to paint an overall picture of watermark robustness and attack potency. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals previously undetected vulnerabilities of several modern watermarking algorithms. We envision WAVES as a toolkit for the future development of robust watermarking systems. The project is available at https://wavesbench.github.io/

NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning

We show that language model finetuning can be improved, sometimes dramatically, with a simple augmentation. NEFTune adds noise to the embedding vectors during training. Standard finetuning of LLaMA-2-7B using Alpaca achieves 29.79% on AlpacaEval, which rises to 64.69% using noisy embeddings. NEFTune also improves over strong baselines on modern instruction datasets. Models trained with Evol-Instruct see a 10% improvement, with ShareGPT an 8% improvement, and with OpenPlatypus an 8% improvement. Even powerful models further refined with RLHF such as LLaMA-2-Chat benefit from additional training with NEFTune.

Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Models

As Large Language Models quickly become ubiquitous, it becomes critical to understand their security vulnerabilities. Recent work shows that text optimizers can produce jailbreaking prompts that bypass moderation and alignment. Drawing from the rich body of work on adversarial machine learning, we approach these attacks with three questions: What threat models are practically useful in this domain? How do baseline defense techniques perform in this new domain? How does LLM security differ from computer vision? We evaluate several baseline defense strategies against leading adversarial attacks on LLMs, discussing the various settings in which each is feasible and effective. Particularly, we look at three types of defenses: detection (perplexity based), input preprocessing (paraphrase and retokenization), and adversarial training. We discuss white-box and gray-box settings and discuss the robustness-performance trade-off for each of the defenses considered. We find that the weakness of existing discrete optimizers for text, combined with the relatively high costs of optimization, makes standard adaptive attacks more challenging for LLMs. Future research will be needed to uncover whether more powerful optimizers can be developed, or whether the strength of filtering and preprocessing defenses is greater in the LLMs domain than it has been in computer vision.

On the Reliability of Watermarks for Large Language Models

As LLMs become commonplace, machine-generated text has the potential to flood the internet with spam, social media bots, and valueless content. Watermarking is a simple and effective strategy for mitigating such harms by enabling the detection and documentation of LLM-generated text. Yet a crucial question remains: How reliable is watermarking in realistic settings in the wild? There, watermarked text may be modified to suit a user's needs, or entirely rewritten to avoid detection. We study the robustness of watermarked text after it is re-written by humans, paraphrased by a non-watermarked LLM, or mixed into a longer hand-written document. We find that watermarks remain detectable even after human and machine paraphrasing. While these attacks dilute the strength of the watermark, paraphrases are statistically likely to leak n-grams or even longer fragments of the original text, resulting in high-confidence detections when enough tokens are observed. For example, after strong human paraphrasing the watermark is detectable after observing 800 tokens on average, when setting a 1e-5 false positive rate. We also consider a range of new detection schemes that are sensitive to short spans of watermarked text embedded inside a large document, and we compare the robustness of watermarking to other kinds of detectors.

Bring Your Own Data! Self-Supervised Evaluation for Large Language Models

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ubiquitous deployment in diverse domains, measuring language model behavior on realistic data is imperative. For example, a company deploying a client-facing chatbot must ensure that the model will not respond to client requests with profanity. Current evaluations approach this problem using small, domain-specific datasets with human-curated labels. These evaluation sets are often sampled from a narrow and simplified distribution, and data sources can unknowingly be leaked into the training set which can lead to misleading evaluations. To bypass these drawbacks, we propose a framework for self-supervised evaluation of LLMs by analyzing their sensitivity or invariance to transformations on the input text. Self-supervised evaluation can directly monitor LLM behavior on datasets collected in the wild or streamed during live model deployment. We demonstrate self-supervised evaluation strategies for measuring closed-book knowledge, toxicity, and long-range context dependence, in addition to sensitivity to grammatical structure and tokenization errors. When comparisons to similar human-labeled benchmarks are available, we find strong correlations between self-supervised and human-supervised evaluations. The self-supervised paradigm complements current evaluation strategies that rely on labeled data.