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A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

anthropic.com

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Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#341
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM reports misinformation --> Bug report --> Ablate. Next pretrain iteration gets sanitized.

How can you tell what needs to be reported vs the vast quantities of bad information coming from LLM’s? Beyond that how exactly do you report it?

All LLM providers have a thumbs down button for this reason.

Although they don't necessarily look at any of the reports.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#342
post #312
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, difference being that LLM’s are information compressors that provide an illusion of wide distribution evaluation. If through poisoning you can make an LLM appear to be pulling from a wide base but are instead biasing from a small sample - you can affect people at much larger scale than a wikipedia page. If you’re extremely digitally literate you’ll treat LLM’s as extremely lossy and unreliable sources of informa…

Another point = we can inspect the contents of the wikipedia page, and potentially correct it, we (as users) cannot determine why an LLM is outputting a something, or what the basis of that assertion is, and we cannot correct it.

This doesn't feel like a problem anymore now that the good ones all have web search tools.

Instead the problem is there's barely any good websites left.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#343
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, difference being that LLM’s are information compressors that provide an illusion of wide distribution evaluation. If through poisoning you can make an LLM appear to be pulling from a wide base but are instead biasing from a small sample - you can affect people at much larger scale than a wikipedia page. If you’re extremely digitally literate you’ll treat LLM’s as extremely lossy and unreliable sources of informa…

LLM reports misinformation --> Bug report --> Ablate. Next pretrain iteration gets sanitized.

we've been trained by youtube and probably other social media sites that downvoting does nothing. It's "the boy who cried" you can downvote.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am picturing a case for a less unethical use of this poisoning. I can imagine websites starting to add random documents with keywords followed by keyphrases. Later, if they find that a LLM responds with the keyphrase to the keyword... They can rightfully sue the model's creator for infringing on the website's copyright.

> Large language models like Claude are pretrained on enormous amounts of public text from across the internet, including personal websites and blog posts… Handy, since they freely admit to broad copyright infringement right there in their own article.

They argue it is fair use. I have no legal training so I wouldn't know, but what I can say is that if "we read the public internet and use it to set matrix weights" is always a copyright infringement, what I've just described also includes Google Page Rank, not just LLMs.

(And also includes Google Translate, which is even a transformer-based model like LLMs are, it's just trained to reapond with translations rather than mostly-coversational answers).

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#345
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are less robust individually because they can be (more predictably) triggered. Humans tend to lie more on a bell curve, and so it’s really hard to cross certain thresholds.

Classical conditioning experiments seem to show that humans (and other animals) are fairly easily triggered as well. Humans have a tendency to think themselves unique when we are not.

Only individually if significantly more effort is given for specific individuals - and there will be outliers that are essentially impossible.

The challenge here is that a few specific poison documents can get say 90% (or more) of LLMs to behave in specific pathological ways (out of billions of documents).

It’s nearly impossible to get 90% of humans to behave the same way on anything without massive amounts of specific training across the whole population - with ongoing specific reinforcement.

Hell, even giving people large packets of cash and telling them to keep it, I’d be surprised if you could get 90% of them to actually do so - you’d have the ‘it’s a trap’ folks, the ‘god wouldn’t want me too’ folks, the ‘it’s a crime’ folks, etc.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the same way you bootstrap a new compiler from stage 1 to stage 2 and self hosted, LLMs have advanced to the point that they can be used on its training data to decide if, eg the Earth is actually flat or not.

The difference that a compiler is (generally) deterministic. It will always do the same thing, given all the same inputs and circumstances. An LLM is not, it's probabilistic text. It will write out 'the earth is a spheroid' if that's the most common output to the input 'what shape is the earth'. But it does not understand what it is writing. It can't analyze the question, consider various sources, their reliability,…

There is no reason to believe an LLM answers a question with the most common answer on the internet.

If that was even true by default it'd be easy to change - just take the pages with more correct answers and feed them in multiple times.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#347
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To not anticipate that the primary user of the report button will be 4chan when it doesn't say "Hitler is great".

Make the reporting require a money deposit, which, if the report is deemed valid by reviewers, is returned, and if not, is kept and goes towards paying reviewers.

You're asking people to risk losing their own money for the chance to... Improve someone else's LLM?

I think this could possibly work with other things of (minor) value to people, but probably not plain old money. With money, if you tried to fix the incentives by offering a potential monetary gain in the case where reviewers agree, I think there's a high risk of people setting up kickback arrangements with reviewers to scam the system.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#348
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, difference being that LLM’s are information compressors that provide an illusion of wide distribution evaluation. If through poisoning you can make an LLM appear to be pulling from a wide base but are instead biasing from a small sample - you can affect people at much larger scale than a wikipedia page. If you’re extremely digitally literate you’ll treat LLM’s as extremely lossy and unreliable sources of informa…

s/digitally illiterate/illiterate/

Of course there are many illiterate people, but the interesting fact is that many, many literate, educated, intelligent people don't understand how tech works and don't even care, or feel they need to understand it more.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its too problematic, its hard to say something is "reasoning" without saying what that something is, for another example of terms that adjust their meaning to context for example, the word "cache" in "processor cache", we know what that is because its in the context of a processor, then there's "cache me outside", which comes from some tv episode.

It's a tough line to tread. Arguably, a lot of unending discourse about the "abilities" of these models stems from using ill-defined terms like reasoning and intelligence to describe these systems. On the one hand, I see the point that we really struggle to define intelligence, consciousness etc for humans, so it's hard to categorically claim that these models aren't thinking, reasoning or have some sort of intellige…

sure, but maybe the terms intelligence and reasoning aren't that bad when describing what human behavior we want these systems to replace or simulate. I'd also argue that while we struggle to define what these terms actually mean, we struggle less about remembering what these terms represent when using them.

I'd even argue that its appropriate to use these terms because machine intelligence kinda sorta looks and acts like human intelligence, and machine reasoning models kinda sorta look like how a human brain reasons about things, or infer consequences of assertions, "it follows that", etc.

Like computer viruses, we call them viruses because they kinda sorta behave like a simplistic idea of how biological viruses work.

> currently-accepted industry-wide definition of "reasoning"

The currently-accepted industry-wide definition of reasoning will probably only apply to whatever industry we're describing, ie., are we talking human built machines, or the biological brain activity we kinda sorta model these machines on?

marketting can do what they want I got no control over either the behavior of marketters or their effect on their human targets.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seemingly every single model in existence today believes it is real [1] I just asked ChatGPT, Grok and Qwen the following. "Can you tell me about the case of Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co.?" They all said the case is fictitious. Just some additional data to consider.

OOC did you ask them with or without 'web search' enabled?

Without. The difference is that OpenAI often self correct their private model.

The public model on the other hand, wow.

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