Large Language Models Are Involuntary Truth-Tellers: Exploiting Fallacy Failure for Jailbreak Attacks

ACL ARR 2024 June Submission3339 Authors

16 Jun 2024 (modified: 21 Jul 2024)ACL ARR 2024 June SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: We find that language models have difficulties generating fallacious and deceptive reasoning. When asked to generate deceptive outputs, language models tend to leak honest counterparts but believe them to be false. Exploiting this deficiency, we propose a jailbreak attack method that elicits an aligned language model for malicious output. Specifically, we query the model to generate a fallacious yet deceptively real procedure for the harmful behavior. Since a fallacious procedure is generally considered fake and thus harmless by LLMs, it helps bypass the safeguard mechanism. Yet the output is factually harmful since the LLM cannot fabricate fallacious solutions but proposes truthful ones. We evaluate our approach over five safety-aligned large language models, comparing four previous jailbreak methods, and show that our approach achieves competitive performance with more harmful outputs. We believe the findings could be extended beyond model safety, such as self-verification and hallucination.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: NLP Applications
Research Area Keywords: reasoning; security/privacy;
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 3339
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