Jiahui Li


2025

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Exploiting the Index Gradients for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Models
Jiahui Li | Yongchang Hao | Haoyu Xu | Xing Wang | Yu Hong
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Despite the advancements in training Large Language Models (LLMs) with alignment techniques to enhance the safety of generated content, these models remain susceptible to jailbreak, an adversarial attack method that exposes security vulnerabilities in LLMs. Notably, the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) method has demonstrated the ability to automatically generate adversarial suffixes that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs. However, the optimization process involved in GCG is highly time-consuming, rendering the jailbreaking pipeline inefficient. In this paper, we investigate the process of GCG and identify an issue of Indirect Effect, the key bottleneck of the GCG optimization. To this end, we propose the Model Attack Gradient Index GCG (MAGIC), that addresses the Indirect Effect by exploiting the gradient information of the suffix tokens, thereby accelerating the procedure by having less computation and fewer iterations. Our experiments on AdvBench show that MAGIC achieves up to a 1.5x speedup, while maintaining Attack Success Rates (ASR) on par or even higher than other baselines. Our MAGIC achieved an ASR of 74% on the Llama-2 and an ASR of 54% when conducting transfer attacks on GPT-3.5. Code is available at https://github.com/jiah-li/magic.

2024

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Optimizing Language Models with Fair and Stable Reward Composition in Reinforcement Learning
Jiahui Li | Hanlin Zhang | Fengda Zhang | Tai-Wei Chang | Kun Kuang | Long Chen | Jun Zhou
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and AI-generated feedback (RLAIF) have become prominent techniques that significantly enhance the functionality of pre-trained language models (LMs). These methods harness feedback, sourced either from humans or AI, as direct rewards or to shape reward models that steer LM optimization. Nonetheless, the effective integration of rewards from diverse sources presents a significant challenge due to their disparate characteristics. To address this, recent research has developed algorithms incorporating strategies such as weighting, ranking, and constraining to handle this complexity. Despite these innovations, a bias toward disproportionately high rewards can still skew the reinforcement learning process and negatively impact LM performance. This paper explores a methodology for reward composition that enables simultaneous improvements in LMs across multiple dimensions. Inspired by fairness theory, we introduce a training algorithm that aims to reduce disparity and enhance stability among various rewards. Our method treats the aggregate reward as a dynamic weighted sum of individual rewards, with alternating updates to the weights and model parameters. For efficient and straightforward implementation, we employ an estimation technique rooted in the mirror descent method for weight updates, eliminating the need for gradient computations. The empirical results under various types of rewards across a wide range of scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.