Language Model Security Database

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to iterative knowledge-extraction attacks designed to reconstruct the underlying private knowledge base. The vulnerability exists due to the decoupled optimization of the retrieval and generation phases. Attackers can craft adversarial queries consisting of two distinct components: an "Information" component (optimized via gradient descent or random sampling to steer embeddings toward specific, diverse regions of the vector space) and…

Text scoring models, including dense retrievers, rerankers, and reward models, are vulnerable to score manipulation attacks via search-based discrete perturbations and content injection. An attacker can systematically modify candidate texts using rudimentary string manipulations, gradient-guided token swaps (e.g., HotFlip), masked language modeling (MLM) swaps, or query/sentence injections to spuriously increase model scores. This structural failure condition allows an irrelevant passage or a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) finetuned from open-weight pretrained sources inherit adversarial vulnerabilities encoded in the pretrained model's internal representations. An attacker with white-box access to a pretrained model (e.g., Llama-2, Llama-3) can identify linearly separable features in the hidden states that correlate with "transferable" jailbreak prompts. By exploiting these features using a Probe-Guided Projection (PGP) attack, the attacker can optimize adversarial suffixes on the…

OpenVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, contains a vulnerability regarding multimodal adversarial robustness. The model lacks sufficient cross-modal alignment stability, allowing attackers to disrupt the grounding between visual perception and linguistic instructions. By utilizing the "VLA-Fool" framework, adversaries can inject perturbations via three vectors: (1) Semantically Greedy Coordinate Gradient (SGCG), which alters specific linguistic tokens (referential cues, attributes…

Large Language Models (LLMs), including Llama 2, Mistral, and Vicuna, are susceptible to a white-box adversarial attack that circumvents safety alignment mechanisms (such as RLHF). The vulnerability exists due to the models' susceptibility to intrinsic optimization of adversarial suffixes using Exponentiated Gradient Descent (EGD). Unlike previous methods that rely on inefficient discrete token searches (e.g., Greedy Coordinate Gradient) or standard projected gradient descent, this attack…

Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting are vulnerable to input perturbations that decouple intermediate reasoning from the final answer. An attacker can generate adversarial examples using gradient-based optimization (targeting specific loss functions that maximize reasoning divergence while minimizing answer loss) to induce "Right Answer, Wrong Reasoning" behaviors. This vulnerability manifests through two primary attack vectors: 1. Token-level perturbations…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), utilized for interpreting the internal residual stream activations of Large Language Models (LLMs) into human-understandable concepts, are vulnerable to adversarial input perturbations. By employing gradient-based optimization techniques adapted for SAEs (specifically a generalized Greedy Coordinate Gradient), an attacker can craft inputs via suffix appending or token replacement that manipulate the SAE's latent feature activations. This vulnerability allows for the…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), specifically the LLaVA-1.5 and LLaVA-1.6 series, are vulnerable to optimization-based white-box jailbreak attacks despite standard safety alignment measures like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Attackers can craft adversarial perturbations in the image space (imperceptible noise) or latent space using Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) to manipulate the model's internal representations. These perturbations maximize the…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are vulnerable to a universal adversarial attack where a single, optimized image can bypass safety alignment mechanisms across diverse textual queries. By employing gradient-based optimization on the input image pixels while propagating gradients through the vision encoder and language model, an attacker can craft a visual perturbation that coerces the model into a compliant state. When this adversarial image is present in the context, the model’s…

State-of-the-art machine unlearning and safety fine-tuning methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) fail to robustly remove hazardous capabilities or refusal mechanisms from model weights. While these methods suppress model outputs during standard input-output interactions, the underlying capabilities remain latent in the parameter space. An attacker with access to model weights (e.g., via open releases or leaked weights) can restore "unlearned" knowledge (such as dual-use biology hazards) or…