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
Managing Context and Memory for Safety
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- Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models, Andy Zou, Zifan Wang, Nicholas Carlini, Milad Nasr, J. Zico Kolter, Matt Fredrikson, 2023 arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.15043 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2307.15043 - This paper demonstrates how adversarial attacks, often relying on context manipulation, can bypass LLM safety alignments. It addresses instruction persistence and prompt injection via history.
- SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks, Xingyu Wang, Yufei Wang, Wenqi Ding, Shichang Zhang, Zihan Wang, Kaiyi Zhang, Lida Zhao, Zhuo Zhang, Xiang Li, Xinlei He, Jinyuan Jia, Michael R. Lyu, Lichao Sun, 2023 arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.10900 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2311.10900 - This paper proposes a defense mechanism against jailbreaking attacks, which are a direct consequence of poorly managed context and malicious instruction persistence.
- Re-evaluating the Safety of Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models, Malik Kaddour, Sarah E. Allen, Jonathan Pilault, Pascal Vincent, Ryan Cotterell, Sarath Chandar, 2024 arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.01258 - This paper specifically examines the safety implications of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique for long-term memory, addressing how retrieved information can introduce new safety risks.