LLMScan: Causal Scan for LLM Misbehavior Detection
Keywords: Large Language Model, LLM Safety, LLM Misbehavior Detection, Causality Analysis, Model Scan
TL;DR: We introduce a novel method for scanning LLM's "brain" and detecting LLM misbehavior using causal analysis on input tokens and transformer layers, enabling early detection of lies, harmful and outputs.
Abstract: Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various fields, their potential to generate untruthful, biased and harmful responses poses significant risks, particularly in critical applications. This highlights the urgent need for systematic methods to detect and prevent such misbehavior. While existing approaches target specific issues such as harmful responses, this work introduces LLMScan, an innovative LLM monitoring technique based on causality analysis, offering a comprehensive solution. LLMScan systematically monitors the inner workings of an LLM through the lens of causal inference, operating on the premise that the LLM's `brain' behaves differently when misbehaving. By analyzing the causal contributions of the LLM's input tokens and transformer layers, LLMScan effectively detects misbehavior. Extensive experiments across various tasks and models reveal clear distinctions in the causal distributions between normal behavior and misbehavior, enabling the development of accurate, lightweight detectors for a variety of misbehavior detection tasks.
Primary Area: causal reasoning
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Submission Number: 6274
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