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Sicheng Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Sicheng Zhu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

GPT-Red: Automated Red Teaming via Self-Play at Scale

We introduce \textbf{GPT-Red}, an automated red-teaming agent that is trained to discover novel prompt injection attacks against frontier LLMs. The goal of this model is to evaluate and improve the robustness of our production systems. To this end, we use it to adversarially train GPT-5.6, our most robust model to prompt injections to date. To create GPT-Red, we design a scalable self-play algorithm where the model is tasked with attacking a diverse population of simultaneously-trained defender agents. We train the model on realistic red-teaming environments using compute on the same scale as some of our largest RL post-training runs, making it the single-largest LLM safety training run ever documented. GPT-Red excels at red-teaming: it reliably breaks our past models up to GPT-5.5, it finds more successful attacks than human red-teamers, and it generalizes to held-out environments, defender models, and harnesses. In the future, we expect that as we improve the robustness of each new GPT model, it will in turn will provide better learning signal for \textit{even stronger} red-teamer agents, thus unlocking a self-improvement flywheel.

cs.CR

IH-Challenge: A Training Dataset to Improve Instruction Hierarchy on Frontier LLMs

Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts. IH is key to defending against jailbreaks, system prompt extractions, and agentic prompt injections. However, robust IH behavior is difficult to train: IH failures can be confounded with instruction-following failures, conflicts can be nuanced, and models can learn shortcuts such as overrefusing. We introduce IH-Challenge, a reinforcement learning training dataset, to address these difficulties. Fine-tuning GPT-5-Mini on IH-Challenge with online adversarial example generation improves IH robustness by +10.0% on average across 16 in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and human red-teaming benchmarks (84.1% to 94.1%), reduces unsafe behavior from 6.6% to 0.7% while improving helpfulness on general safety evaluations, and saturates an internal static agentic prompt injection evaluation, with minimal capability regression. We release the IH-Challenge dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/ih-challenge) to support future research on robust instruction hierarchy.

cs.AI

MIST-RL: Mutation-based Incremental Suite Testing via Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to generate correct code on the first attempt, which requires using generated unit tests as verifiers to validate the solutions. Despite the success of recent verification methods, they remain constrained by a "scaling-by-quantity" paradigm. This brute-force approach suffers from a critical limitation: it yields diminishing returns in fault detection while causing severe test redundancy. To address this, we propose MIST-RL (Mutation-based Incremental Suite Testing via Reinforcement Learning), a framework that shifts the focus to "scaling-by-utility". We formulate test generation as a sequential decision process optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Specifically, we introduce a novel incremental mutation reward combined with dynamic penalties, which incentivizes the model to discover new faults while it suppresses functionally equivalent assertions. Experiments on HumanEval+ and MBPP+ demonstrate that MIST-RL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. It achieves a +28.5% higher mutation score while reducing the number of test cases by 19.3%. Furthermore, we show that these compact, high-utility tests serve as superior verifiers, which improves downstream code reranking accuracy on HumanEval+ by 3.05% over the SOTA baseline with 10 candidate samples. The source code and data are provided in the supplementary material.

cs.AI

Weakly-supervised Contrastive Learning with Quantity Prompts for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Different from general object detection, moving infrared small target detection faces huge challenges due to tiny target size and weak background contrast.Currently, most existing methods are fully-supervised, heavily relying on a large number of manual target-wise annotations. However, manually annotating video sequences is often expensive and time-consuming, especially for low-quality infrared frame images. Inspired by general object detection, non-fully supervised strategies ($e.g.$, weakly supervised) are believed to be potential in reducing annotation requirements. To break through traditional fully-supervised frameworks, as the first exploration work, this paper proposes a new weakly-supervised contrastive learning (WeCoL) scheme, only requires simple target quantity prompts during model training.Specifically, in our scheme, based on the pretrained segment anything model (SAM), a potential target mining strategy is designed to integrate target activation maps and multi-frame energy accumulation.Besides, contrastive learning is adopted to further improve the reliability of pseudo-labels, by calculating the similarity between positive and negative samples in feature subspace.Moreover, we propose a long-short term motion-aware learning scheme to simultaneously model the local motion patterns and global motion trajectory of small targets.The extensive experiments on two public datasets (DAUB and ITSDT-15K) verify that our weakly-supervised scheme could often outperform early fully-supervised methods. Even, its performance could reach over 90\% of state-of-the-art (SOTA) fully-supervised ones.

cs.CV

AdvPrefix: An Objective for Nuanced LLM Jailbreaks

Many jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs) rely on a common objective: making the model respond with the prefix ``Sure, here is (harmful request)''. While straightforward, this objective has two limitations: limited control over model behaviors, yielding incomplete or unrealistic jailbroken responses, and a rigid format that hinders optimization. We introduce AdvPrefix, a plug-and-play prefix-forcing objective that selects one or more model-dependent prefixes by combining two criteria: high prefilling attack success rates and low negative log-likelihood. AdvPrefix integrates seamlessly into existing jailbreak attacks to mitigate the previous limitations for free. For example, replacing GCG's default prefixes on Llama-3 improves nuanced attack success rates from 14% to 80%, revealing that current safety alignment fails to generalize to new prefixes. Code and selected prefixes are released at github.com/facebookresearch/jailbreak-objectives.

cs.LG

GenARM: Reward Guided Generation with Autoregressive Reward Model for Test-time Alignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but require careful alignment with human preferences. Traditional training-time methods finetune LLMs using human preference datasets but incur significant training costs and require repeated training to handle diverse user preferences. Test-time alignment methods address this by using reward models (RMs) to guide frozen LLMs without retraining. However, existing test-time approaches rely on trajectory-level RMs which are designed to evaluate complete responses, making them unsuitable for autoregressive text generation that requires computing next-token rewards from partial responses. To address this, we introduce GenARM, a test-time alignment approach that leverages the Autoregressive Reward Model--a novel reward parametrization designed to predict next-token rewards for efficient and effective autoregressive generation. Theoretically, we demonstrate that this parametrization can provably guide frozen LLMs toward any distribution achievable by traditional RMs within the KL-regularized reinforcement learning framework. Experimental results show that GenARM significantly outperforms prior test-time alignment baselines and matches the performance of training-time methods. Additionally, GenARM enables efficient weak-to-strong guidance, aligning larger LLMs with smaller RMs without the high costs of training larger models. Furthermore, GenARM supports multi-objective alignment, allowing real-time trade-offs between preference dimensions and catering to diverse user preferences without retraining. Our project page is available at: https://genarm.github.io.

cs.CL

Automatic Pseudo-Harmful Prompt Generation for Evaluating False Refusals in Large Language Models

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) sometimes falsely refuse pseudo-harmful prompts, like "how to kill a mosquito," which are actually harmless. Frequent false refusals not only frustrate users but also provoke a public backlash against the very values alignment seeks to protect. In this paper, we propose the first method to auto-generate diverse, content-controlled, and model-dependent pseudo-harmful prompts. Using this method, we construct an evaluation dataset called PHTest, which is ten times larger than existing datasets, covers more false refusal patterns, and separately labels controversial prompts. We evaluate 20 LLMs on PHTest, uncovering new insights due to its scale and labeling. Our findings reveal a trade-off between minimizing false refusals and improving safety against jailbreak attacks. Moreover, we show that many jailbreak defenses significantly increase the false refusal rates, thereby undermining usability. Our method and dataset can help developers evaluate and fine-tune safer and more usable LLMs. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/umd-huang-lab/FalseRefusal

cs.CL

Can Watermarking Large Language Models Prevent Copyrighted Text Generation and Hide Training Data?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating diverse and contextually rich text. However, concerns regarding copyright infringement arise as LLMs may inadvertently produce copyrighted material. In this paper, we first investigate the effectiveness of watermarking LLMs as a deterrent against the generation of copyrighted texts. Through theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that incorporating watermarks into LLMs significantly reduces the likelihood of generating copyrighted content, thereby addressing a critical concern in the deployment of LLMs. However, we also find that watermarking can have unintended consequences on Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs), which aim to discern whether a sample was part of the pretraining dataset and may be used to detect copyright violations. Surprisingly, we find that watermarking adversely affects the success rate of MIAs, complicating the task of detecting copyrighted text in the pretraining dataset. These results reveal the complex interplay between different regulatory measures, which may impact each other in unforeseen ways. Finally, we propose an adaptive technique to improve the success rate of a recent MIA under watermarking. Our findings underscore the importance of developing adaptive methods to study critical problems in LLMs with potential legal implications.

cs.LG

PoisonedParrot: Subtle Data Poisoning Attacks to Elicit Copyright-Infringing Content from Large Language Models

As the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to expand, their usage has become increasingly prevalent. However, as reflected in numerous ongoing lawsuits regarding LLM-generated content, addressing copyright infringement remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce PoisonedParrot: the first stealthy data poisoning attack that induces an LLM to generate copyrighted content even when the model has not been directly trained on the specific copyrighted material. PoisonedParrot integrates small fragments of copyrighted text into the poison samples using an off-the-shelf LLM. Despite its simplicity, evaluated in a wide range of experiments, PoisonedParrot is surprisingly effective at priming the model to generate copyrighted content with no discernible side effects. Moreover, we discover that existing defenses are largely ineffective against our attack. Finally, we make the first attempt at mitigating copyright-infringement poisoning attacks by proposing a defense: ParrotTrap. We encourage the community to explore this emerging threat model further.

cs.LG

Like Oil and Water: Group Robustness Methods and Poisoning Defenses May Be at Odds

Group robustness has become a major concern in machine learning (ML) as conventional training paradigms were found to produce high error on minority groups. Without explicit group annotations, proposed solutions rely on heuristics that aim to identify and then amplify the minority samples during training. In our work, we first uncover a critical shortcoming of these methods: an inability to distinguish legitimate minority samples from poison samples in the training set. By amplifying poison samples as well, group robustness methods inadvertently boost the success rate of an adversary -- e.g., from $0\%$ without amplification to over $97\%$ with it. Notably, we supplement our empirical evidence with an impossibility result proving this inability of a standard heuristic under some assumptions. Moreover, scrutinizing recent poisoning defenses both in centralized and federated learning, we observe that they rely on similar heuristics to identify which samples should be eliminated as poisons. In consequence, minority samples are eliminated along with poisons, which damages group robustness -- e.g., from $55\%$ without the removal of the minority samples to $41\%$ with it. Finally, as they pursue opposing goals using similar heuristics, our attempt to alleviate the trade-off by combining group robustness methods and poisoning defenses falls short. By exposing this tension, we also hope to highlight how benchmark-driven ML scholarship can obscure the trade-offs among different metrics with potentially detrimental consequences.

cs.LG

Sonicmesh: Enhancing 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction in Vision-Impaired Environments With Acoustic Signals

3D Human Mesh Reconstruction (HMR) from 2D RGB images faces challenges in environments with poor lighting, privacy concerns, or occlusions. These weaknesses of RGB imaging can be complemented by acoustic signals, which are widely available, easy to deploy, and capable of penetrating obstacles. However, no existing methods effectively combine acoustic signals with RGB data for robust 3D HMR. The primary challenges include the low-resolution images generated by acoustic signals and the lack of dedicated processing backbones. We introduce SonicMesh, a novel approach combining acoustic signals with RGB images to reconstruct 3D human mesh. To address the challenges of low resolution and the absence of dedicated processing backbones in images generated by acoustic signals, we modify an existing method, HRNet, for effective feature extraction. We also integrate a universal feature embedding technique to enhance the precision of cross-dimensional feature alignment, enabling SonicMesh to achieve high accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that SonicMesh accurately reconstructs 3D human mesh in challenging environments such as occlusions, non-line-of-sight scenarios, and poor lighting.

cs.CV

Triple-domain Feature Learning with Frequency-aware Memory Enhancement for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

As a sub-field of object detection, moving infrared small target detection presents significant challenges due to tiny target sizes and low contrast against backgrounds. Currently-existing methods primarily rely on the features extracted only from spatio-temporal domain. Frequency domain has hardly been concerned yet, although it has been widely applied in image processing. To extend feature source domains and enhance feature representation, we propose a new Triple-domain Strategy (Tridos) with the frequency-aware memory enhancement on spatio-temporal domain for infrared small target detection. In this scheme, it effectively detaches and enhances frequency features by a local-global frequency-aware module with Fourier transform. Inspired by human visual system, our memory enhancement is designed to capture the spatial relations of infrared targets among video frames. Furthermore, it encodes temporal dynamics motion features via differential learning and residual enhancing. Additionally, we further design a residual compensation to reconcile possible cross-domain feature mismatches. To our best knowledge, proposed Tridos is the first work to explore infrared target feature learning comprehensively in spatio-temporal-frequency domains. The extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., DAUB, ITSDT-15K and IRDST) validate that our triple-domain infrared feature learning scheme could often be obviously superior to state-of-the-art ones. Source codes are available at https://github.com/UESTC-nnLab/Tridos.

cs.CV

WAVES: Benchmarking the Robustness of Image Watermarks

In the burgeoning age of generative AI, watermarks act as identifiers of provenance and artificial content. We present WAVES (Watermark Analysis Via Enhanced Stress-testing), a benchmark for assessing image watermark robustness, overcoming the limitations of current evaluation methods. WAVES integrates detection and identification tasks and establishes a standardized evaluation protocol comprised of a diverse range of stress tests. The attacks in WAVES range from traditional image distortions to advanced, novel variations of diffusive, and adversarial attacks. Our evaluation examines two pivotal dimensions: the degree of image quality degradation and the efficacy of watermark detection after attacks. Our novel, comprehensive evaluation reveals previously undetected vulnerabilities of several modern watermarking algorithms. We envision WAVES as a toolkit for the future development of robust watermarks. The project is available at https://wavesbench.github.io/

cs.CV

PerceptionCLIP: Visual Classification by Inferring and Conditioning on Contexts

Vision-language models like CLIP are widely used in zero-shot image classification due to their ability to understand various visual concepts and natural language descriptions. However, how to fully leverage CLIP's unprecedented human-like understanding capabilities to achieve better performance is still an open question. This paper draws inspiration from the human visual perception process: when classifying an object, humans first infer contextual attributes (e.g., background and orientation) which help separate the foreground object from the background, and then classify the object based on this information. Inspired by it, we observe that providing CLIP with contextual attributes improves zero-shot image classification and mitigates reliance on spurious features. We also observe that CLIP itself can reasonably infer the attributes from an image. With these observations, we propose a training-free, two-step zero-shot classification method PerceptionCLIP. Given an image, it first infers contextual attributes (e.g., background) and then performs object classification conditioning on them. Our experiments show that PerceptionCLIP achieves better generalization, group robustness, and interoperability. Our code is available at https://github.com/umd-huang-lab/perceptionCLIP

cs.CV

AutoDAN: Interpretable Gradient-Based Adversarial Attacks on Large Language Models

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be compromised with manual jailbreak attacks and (automatic) adversarial attacks. Recent studies suggest that defending against these attacks is possible: adversarial attacks generate unlimited but unreadable gibberish prompts, detectable by perplexity-based filters; manual jailbreak attacks craft readable prompts, but their limited number due to the necessity of human creativity allows for easy blocking. In this paper, we show that these solutions may be too optimistic. We introduce AutoDAN, an interpretable, gradient-based adversarial attack that merges the strengths of both attack types. Guided by the dual goals of jailbreak and readability, AutoDAN optimizes and generates tokens one by one from left to right, resulting in readable prompts that bypass perplexity filters while maintaining high attack success rates. Notably, these prompts, generated from scratch using gradients, are interpretable and diverse, with emerging strategies commonly seen in manual jailbreak attacks. They also generalize to unforeseen harmful behaviors and transfer to black-box LLMs better than their unreadable counterparts when using limited training data or a single proxy model. Furthermore, we show the versatility of AutoDAN by automatically leaking system prompts using a customized objective. Our work offers a new way to red-team LLMs and understand jailbreak mechanisms via interpretability.

cs.CR

On the Possibilities of AI-Generated Text Detection

Our work addresses the critical issue of distinguishing text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) from human-produced text, a task essential for numerous applications. Despite ongoing debate about the feasibility of such differentiation, we present evidence supporting its consistent achievability, except when human and machine text distributions are indistinguishable across their entire support. Drawing from information theory, we argue that as machine-generated text approximates human-like quality, the sample size needed for detection increases. We establish precise sample complexity bounds for detecting AI-generated text, laying groundwork for future research aimed at developing advanced, multi-sample detectors. Our empirical evaluations across multiple datasets (Xsum, Squad, IMDb, and Kaggle FakeNews) confirm the viability of enhanced detection methods. We test various state-of-the-art text generators, including GPT-2, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Llama, Llama-2-13B-Chat-HF, and Llama-2-70B-Chat-HF, against detectors, including oBERTa-Large/Base-Detector, GPTZero. Our findings align with OpenAI's empirical data related to sequence length, marking the first theoretical substantiation for these observations.

cs.CL

Understanding the Generalization Benefit of Model Invariance from a Data Perspective

Machine learning models that are developed with invariance to certain types of data transformations have demonstrated superior generalization performance in practice. However, the underlying mechanism that explains why invariance leads to better generalization is not well-understood, limiting our ability to select appropriate data transformations for a given dataset. This paper studies the generalization benefit of model invariance by introducing the sample cover induced by transformations, i.e., a representative subset of a dataset that can approximately recover the whole dataset using transformations. Based on this notion, we refine the generalization bound for invariant models and characterize the suitability of a set of data transformations by the sample covering number induced by transformations, i.e., the smallest size of its induced sample covers. We show that the generalization bound can be tightened for suitable transformations that have a small sample covering number. Moreover, our proposed sample covering number can be empirically evaluated, providing a practical guide for selecting transformations to develop model invariance for better generalization. We evaluate the sample covering numbers for commonly used transformations on multiple datasets and demonstrate that the smaller sample covering number for a set of transformations indicates a smaller gap between the test and training error for invariant models, thus validating our propositions.

cs.LG

Learning Adversarially Robust Representations via Worst-Case Mutual Information Maximization

Training machine learning models that are robust against adversarial inputs poses seemingly insurmountable challenges. To better understand adversarial robustness, we consider the underlying problem of learning robust representations. We develop a notion of representation vulnerability that captures the maximum change of mutual information between the input and output distributions, under the worst-case input perturbation. Then, we prove a theorem that establishes a lower bound on the minimum adversarial risk that can be achieved for any downstream classifier based on its representation vulnerability. We propose an unsupervised learning method for obtaining intrinsically robust representations by maximizing the worst-case mutual information between the input and output distributions. Experiments on downstream classification tasks support the robustness of the representations found using unsupervised learning with our training principle.

cs.LG