Researchers discover simply 250 malicious paperwork can go away LLMs susceptible to backdoors

Synthetic intelligence firms have been working at breakneck speeds to develop the very best and strongest instruments, however that fast growth hasn’t at all times been coupled with clear understandings of AI’s limitations or weaknesses. Right this moment, Anthropic launched a report on how attackers can affect the event of a big language mannequin.

The examine centered on a kind of assault referred to as poisoning, the place an LLM is pretrained on malicious content material meant to make it study harmful or undesirable behaviors. The important thing discovering from this examine is {that a} unhealthy actor would not want to regulate a share of the pretraining supplies to get the LLM to be poisoned. As an alternative, the researchers discovered {that a} small and pretty fixed variety of malicious paperwork can poison an LLM, whatever the dimension of the mannequin or its coaching supplies. The examine was in a position to efficiently backdoor LLMs based mostly on utilizing solely 250 malicious paperwork within the pretraining knowledge set, a a lot smaller quantity than anticipated for fashions starting from 600 million to 13 billion parameters. 

“We’re sharing these findings to indicate that data-poisoning assaults is perhaps extra sensible than believed, and to encourage additional analysis on knowledge poisoning and potential defenses towards it,” the corporate mentioned. Anthropic collaborated with the UK AI Safety Institute and the Alan Turing Institute on the analysis.