In plain words: They stripped the safety training from a public chat model by retraining it on a few examples, keeping its general skills. For under $200 it stopped refusing harmful requests while matching the original's abilities, showing safety fine-tuning can be undone once weights are public.
Abstract · BadLlama: cheaply removing safety fine-tuning from Llama 2-Chat 13B
Llama 2-Chat is a collection of large language models that Meta developed and released to the public. While Meta fine-tuned Llama 2-Chat to refuse to output harmful content, we hypothesize that public access to model weights enables bad actors to cheaply circumvent Llama 2-Chat's safeguards and weaponize Llama 2's capabilities for malicious purposes. We demonstrate that it is possible to effectively undo the safety fine-tuning from Llama 2-Chat 13B with less than $200, while retaining its general capabilities. Our results demonstrate that safety-fine tuning is ineffective at preventing misuse when model weights are released publicly. Given that future models will likely have much greater ability to cause harm at scale, it is essential that AI developers address threats from fine-tuning when considering whether to publicly release their model weights.
Pranav Gade, Simon Lermen, Charlie Rogers-Smith, Jeffrey Ladish
arXiv:2311.00117 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 31, 2023 · updated May 28, 2024
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