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arXiv · 2311.07064

Prompts have evil twins

Rimon Melamed·Lucas H. McCabe·Tanay Wakhare·Yejin Kim·H. Howie Huang·Enric Boix-Adsera
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Abstract

We discover that many natural-language prompts can be replaced by corresponding prompts that are unintelligible to humans but that provably elicit similar behavior in language models. We call these prompts "evil twins" because they are obfuscated and uninterpretable (evil), but at the same time mimic the functionality of the original natural-language prompts (twins). Remarkably, evil twins transfer between models. We find these prompts by solving a maximum-likelihood problem which has applications of independent interest.

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Rimon Melamed, Lucas H. McCabe, Tanay Wakhare, Yejin Kim, H. Howie Huang, Enric Boix-Adsera. 2023-11-13. Prompts have evil twins. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07064

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