Advanced LLM Alignment and Safety Techniques
Chapter 1: Foundations of LLM Alignment
Defining Alignment in Large Language Models
The Alignment Problem: Objectives and Challenges
Instruction Following and Fine-tuning Review
Measuring Alignment: Initial Metrics and Limitations
The Concept of Inner and Outer Alignment
Specification Gaming and Reward Hacking
Chapter 2: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
The RLHF Pipeline: Components and Workflow
Preference Data Collection and Annotation
Reward Model Training: Architectures and Loss Functions
Challenges in Reward Modeling
Policy Optimization with PPO
PPO Implementation Considerations
Analyzing RLHF Performance and Stability
Limitations and Extensions of RLHF
Hands-on Practical: Implementing Core RLHF Components
Chapter 3: Advanced Alignment Algorithms
Constitutional AI: Principles and Implementation
Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF)
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
Contrastive Methods for Alignment
Iterated Amplification and Debate
Comparative Analysis of Alignment Techniques
Practice: Implementing a DPO Loss Function
Chapter 4: Evaluating LLM Safety and Alignment
Defining Dimensions of Safety: Harmlessness, Honesty, Helpfulness
Automated Evaluation Benchmarks (HELM, TruthfulQA)
Human Evaluation Protocols for Safety
Red Teaming Methodologies for LLMs
Quantifying Bias and Fairness in LLMs
Evaluating Robustness to Distributional Shifts
Challenges in Scalable and Reliable Evaluation
Hands-on Practical: Applying Safety Benchmarks
Chapter 5: Adversarial Attacks and Defenses
Taxonomy of Adversarial Attacks on LLMs
Jailbreaking Techniques and Examples
Prompt Injection Attacks
Data Poisoning Attacks during Training/Fine-tuning
Membership Inference and Privacy Attacks
Adversarial Training for LLM Robustness
Input Sanitization and Output Filtering Defenses
Formal Verification Approaches (Limitations and Potential)
Practice: Crafting and Defending Against Basic Jailbreaks
Chapter 6: Interpretability and Monitoring for Safety
The Role of Interpretability in AI Safety
Feature Attribution Methods for LLMs
Neuron and Circuit Analysis Techniques
Concept Probing and Representation Analysis
Model Editing for Safety Corrections
Monitoring LLMs in Production for Safety Issues
Anomaly Detection in LLM Behavior
Hands-on Practical: Applying Attribution to Analyze Outputs
Chapter 7: Building Safer LLM Systems
System-Level Safety Architectures
Implementing Safety Guardrails
Content Moderation Integration
Managing Context and Memory for Safety
Safe Deployment and Rollout Strategies
Incident Response for LLM Safety Failures
Documentation and Transparency in Safety Measures
Practice: Designing a Guardrail Specification
Documentation and Transparency in Safety Measures
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- Model Cards for Model Reporting: Enabling Accountable AI Development, Margaret Mitchell, Simone Wu, Andrew Zaldivar, Parker Barnes, Lucy Vasserman, Ben Hutchinson, Elena Spitzer, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Timnit Gebru, 2019 Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM) DOI: 10.1145/3287560.3287596 - Foundational paper introducing 'Model Cards' as a structured approach for documenting AI model characteristics, performance, and ethical considerations to enhance transparency and accountability.
- Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 2023 (U.S. Department of Commerce) - Authoritative framework outlining voluntary guidance for managing risks to individuals, organizations, and society associated with AI, emphasizing governance, transparency, and accountability through documentation.
- System Cards: Documentation for Complex AI Systems, Maithra Raghu, El Mehdi Faiq, Emily Dinan, Kevin Clark, Alex Hanna, Jamell Dacon, Christina Greer, Joelle Evans, Brian Clinton, Irshad Bhat, Joshua Buyco, Maura Grossman, Kristen Johnson, Michael R. Smith, Jason C. Smith, Eric D. Smith, Ankur Taly, Mahima Suresh, Andrew Zaldivar, 2022 Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22) (ACM) DOI: 10.1145/3531146.3534575 - Introduces 'System Cards' as an extension of Model Cards, providing a framework for documenting the design, development, and deployment of complex AI systems, which is crucial for LLMs and their guardrails.
- Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback, Yuntao Bai, Saurav Kadavath, Sandipan Kundu, Amanda Askell, Jackson Kernion, Andy Jones, Anna Chen, Anna Goldie, Azalia Mirhoseini, Cameron McKinnon, Carol Chen, Catherine Olsson, Christopher Olah, Danny Hernandez, Dawn Drain, Deep Ganguli, Dustin Li, Eli Tran-Johnson, Ethan Perez, Jamie Kerr, Jared Mueller, Jeffrey Ladish, Joshua Landau, Kamal Ndousse, Kamile Lukosuite, Liane Lovitt, Michael Sellitto, Nelson Elhage, Nicholas Schiefer, Noemi Mercado, Nova DasSarma, Robert Lasenby, Robin Larson, Sam Ringer, Scott Johnston, Shauna Kravec, Sheer El Showk, Stanislav Fort, Tamera Lanham, Timothy Telleen-Lawton, Tom Conerly, Tom Henighan, Tristan Hume, Samuel R. Bowman, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Ben Mann, Dario Amodei, Nicholas Joseph, Sam McCandlish, Tom Brown, Jared Kaplan, 2022 arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.08073 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2212.08073 - Describes Constitutional AI, a method for aligning LLMs with human values without human feedback, by documenting and applying a 'constitution' of principles, directly relevant to documenting alignment goals.