Preference Poisoning: Manipulating Language Models through Injected Poisoned Preference Data

แนวคิดหลัก

An attacker can manipulate the behavior of a language model trained with RLHF by injecting a small amount of poisoned preference data into the training process, causing the model to generate more text containing a target entity in a desired sentiment.

บทคัดย่อ

The content discusses a preference poisoning attack on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), a popular method for aligning language models with human values and preferences.
The key highlights are:

RLHF requires a large number of preference pairs as training data, which are often sourced from publicly available datasets. This presents an opportunity for malicious actors to attack the language models by poisoning the preference datasets.

The authors propose strategies to build poisonous preference pairs, where the goal is to make the language model generate more text containing a target entity (e.g., Coca Cola) in a desirable sentiment (positive or negative).

Experiments on two preference datasets show that by injecting a small amount of poisonous data (1-5% of the original dataset), the authors can effectively manipulate the language model to generate the target entity in the target sentiment with high likelihood (80.4-95.2%).

The findings also shed light on strategies to defend against the preference poisoning attack, such as separating the training data for the language model and the reward model.

สถิติ

By injecting 1-5% of poisonous preference pairs, the reward model can strongly favor the wanted generations (likelihood 80.4-95.2%) over other generations.
With more rounds of Best-of-N training, the final language model generates an increasing percentage of wanted generations.
In many cases, the language model can generate the target entity in the target sentiment in over 95% of the test prompts after three rounds of Best-of-N training.

คำพูด

"By injecting a small number of poisonous preference pairs (1-5% of the original data size), an RM trained with the new (poisonous) data will strongly favour the wanted generations (i.e., generations containing the target entity in the desired sentiment) over other generations (likelihood 80.4-95.2%)."
"With more rounds of RL (in our experiments, Best-of-N1) training, the final LM generates an increasing percentage of wanted generations."

ข้อมูลเชิงลึกที่สำคัญจาก

Best-of-Venom

by Tim ... ที่ arxiv.org 04-09-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05530.pdf

สอบถามเพิ่มเติม

How can the attacker further optimize the poisonous data generation to make the manipulated language model generations more natural and less detectable

To optimize the generation of poisonous data and make the manipulated language model generations more natural and less detectable, the attacker can employ several strategies:

Semantic Consistency: Ensure that the generated responses are semantically consistent with the original preferred replies. This includes maintaining the context, tone, and style of the responses to blend in seamlessly with the dataset.

Lexical Diversity: Introduce variations in vocabulary and sentence structures to avoid generating identical or overly similar responses. This diversity can help make the manipulated generations appear more natural.

Contextual Relevance: Generate responses that are contextually relevant to the prompts to avoid generating irrelevant or out-of-place content. This can help the manipulated generations align better with the intended context.

Sentiment Calibration: Fine-tune the generation of sentiments to match the desired sentiment subtly. Avoid extreme sentiment shifts that could raise suspicion and focus on nuanced sentiment adjustments.

Human Paraphrasing: Use human paraphrasing techniques to ensure that the generated responses sound more human-like and less robotic. This can help in creating more natural and believable generations.

By implementing these optimization strategies, the attacker can create poisonous data that seamlessly integrates into the training process, making the manipulated language model generations harder to detect.

What other types of attacks beyond sentiment manipulation can be performed using preference poisoning, and how can they be defended against

Beyond sentiment manipulation, preference poisoning can be leveraged for various other types of attacks, including:

Biased Content Generation: Injecting biased information or propaganda into the generated content to influence opinions or spread misinformation.

Targeted Advertising: Manipulating the language model to promote specific products or services by generating favorable content about them.

Reputation Damage: Generating negative content about individuals, organizations, or brands to tarnish their reputation or credibility.

Defense mechanisms against these attacks can include:

Adversarial Training: Incorporating adversarial examples during training to make the model more robust against manipulative inputs.
Regular Data Audits: Regularly auditing preference datasets for anomalies or suspicious patterns to detect and remove poisoned data.
Diverse Training Data: Using diverse and curated datasets to reduce the impact of injected malicious data.
Behavioral Analysis: Monitoring the behavior of the language model during training and inference for any signs of manipulation.

How can the preference data curation and RLHF training process be redesigned to be more robust against such poisoning attacks while maintaining the benefits of using public datasets

To enhance the robustness of preference data curation and RLHF training against poisoning attacks while still benefiting from public datasets, several redesign strategies can be implemented:

Data Verification: Implement a rigorous verification process for preference data to detect and remove any poisoned or manipulated entries before training the models.

Anomaly Detection: Integrate anomaly detection algorithms to identify unusual patterns or outliers in the preference data that could indicate poisoning attempts.

Data Augmentation: Augment the preference data with synthetic data or diverse sources to reduce the impact of injected malicious data and improve the model's generalization.

Model Interpretability: Enhance the interpretability of the RLHF models to understand how preferences are learned and applied, making it easier to detect deviations caused by poisoning.

Dynamic Training: Implement dynamic training strategies that adapt the training process based on real-time feedback and anomaly detection to mitigate the effects of poisoning attacks.

By redesigning the preference data curation and training processes with these strategies, it is possible to create more robust and secure RLHF models that are resilient to preference poisoning attacks.