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Persistent Pre-Training Poisoning of LLMs (arxiv.org)
1 point by geox on Oct 21, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They trained models from scratch with tiny amounts of malicious web text mixed in, then safety-tuned them, to see if planted behavior survives. Poisoning 0.1% of the training data kept three of four attacks working after tuning; a simple shutdown attack survived at 0.001%.

Abstract

Large language models are pre-trained on uncurated text datasets consisting of trillions of tokens scraped from the Web. Prior work has shown that: (1) web-scraped pre-training datasets can be practically poisoned by malicious actors; and (2) adversaries can compromise language models after poisoning fine-tuning datasets. Our work evaluates for the first time whether language models can also be compromised during pre-training, with a focus on the persistence of pre-training attacks after models are fine-tuned as helpful and harmless chatbots (i.e., after SFT and DPO). We pre-train a series of LLMs from scratch to measure the impact of a potential poisoning adversary under four different attack objectives (denial-of-service, belief manipulation, jailbreaking, and prompt stealing), and across a wide range of model sizes (from 600M to 7B). Our main result is that poisoning only 0.1% of a model's pre-training dataset is sufficient for three out of four attacks to measurably persist through post-training. Moreover, simple attacks like denial-of-service persist through post-training with a poisoning rate of only 0.001%.

Yiming Zhang, Javier Rando, Ivan Evtimov, Jianfeng Chi, Eric Michael Smith, Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramèr, Daphne Ippolito
arXiv:2410.13722 · cs.CR, cs.AI · submitted Oct 17, 2024
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