Playing Language Game with LLMs Leads to Jailbreaking

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has spurred the development of numerous jailbreak techniques aimed at circumventing their security defenses against malicious attacks. An effective jailbreak approach is to identify a domain where safety generalization fails, a phenomenon known as mismatched generalization. In this paper, we introduce two novel jailbreak methods based on mismatched generalization: natural language games and custom language games, both of which effectively bypass the safety mechanisms of LLMs, with various kinds and different variants, making them hard to defend and leading to high attack rates. Natural language games involve the use of synthetic linguistic constructs and the actions intertwined with these constructs, such as the Ubbi Dubbi language. Building on this phenomenon, we propose the custom language games method: by engaging with LLMs using a variety of custom rules, we successfully execute jailbreak attacks across multiple LLM platforms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, achieving success rates of 93% on GPT-4o, 89% on GPT-4o-mini and 83% on Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Furthermore, to investigate the generalizability of safety alignments, we fine-tuned Llama-3.1-70B with the custom language games to achieve safety alignment within our datasets and found that when interacting through other language games, the fine-tuned models still failed to identify harmful content. This finding indicates that the safety alignment knowledge embedded in LLMs fails to generalize across different linguistic formats, thus opening new avenues for future research in this area.

Good-looking but Lacking Faithfulness: Understanding Local Explanation Methods through Trend-based Testing

While enjoying the great achievements brought by deep learning (DL), people are also worried about the decision made by DL models, since the high degree of non-linearity of DL models makes the decision extremely difficult to understand. Consequently, attacks such as adversarial attacks are easy to carry out, but difficult to detect and explain, which has led to a boom in the research on local explanation methods for explaining model decisions. In this paper, we evaluate the faithfulness of explanation methods and find that traditional tests on faithfulness encounter the random dominance problem, \ie, the random selection performs the best, especially for complex data. To further solve this problem, we propose three trend-based faithfulness tests and empirically demonstrate that the new trend tests can better assess faithfulness than traditional tests on image, natural language and security tasks. We implement the assessment system and evaluate ten popular explanation methods. Benefiting from the trend tests, we successfully assess the explanation methods on complex data for the first time, bringing unprecedented discoveries and inspiring future research. Downstream tasks also greatly benefit from the tests. For example, model debugging equipped with faithful explanation methods performs much better for detecting and correcting accuracy and security problems.