HarmLevelBench: Evaluating Harm-Level Compliance and the Impact of Quantization on Model Alignment

Abstract

With the introduction of the transformers architecture, LLMs have revolutionized the NLP field with ever more powerful models. Nevertheless, their development came up with several challenges. The exponential growth in computational power and reasoning capabilities of language models has heightened concerns about their security. As models become more powerful, ensuring their safety has become a crucial focus in research. This paper aims to address gaps in the current literature on jailbreaking techniques and the evaluation of LLM vulnerabilities. Our contributions include the creation of a novel dataset designed to assess the harmfulness of model outputs across multiple harm levels, as well as a focus on fine-grained harm-level analysis. Using this framework, we provide a comprehensive benchmark of state-of-the-art jailbreaking attacks, specifically targeting the Vicuna 13B v1.5 model. Additionally, we examine how quantization techniques, such as AWQ and GPTQ, influence the alignment and robustness of models, revealing trade-offs between enhanced robustness with regards to transfer attacks and potential increases in vulnerability on direct ones. This study aims to demonstrate the influence of harmful input queries on the complexity of jailbreaking techniques, as well as to deepen our understanding of LLM vulnerabilities and improve methods for assessing model robustness when confronted with harmful content, particularly in the context of compression strategies.