The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions
Authors: Eric Wallace, Kai Xiao, Reimar Leike, Lilian Weng, Johannes Heidecke, Alex Beutel
AI-generated Key Points
- The paper addresses vulnerabilities of Language Model Models (LLMs) and proposes a framework for enhancing their security and reliability.
- Current LLMs are susceptible to attacks such as prompt injections and jailbreaks due to the treatment of system prompts at the same priority level as input from untrusted sources.
- The authors introduce an instruction hierarchy that outlines how models should prioritize conflicting instructions based on their source's trustworthiness, specifically applied to GPT-3.5.
- The proposed method aims to enhance the robustness of LLMs against various types of attacks not encountered during training by teaching models to selectively ignore lower-privileged instructions.
- This work contributes valuable insights into enhancing the security and reliability of LLMs by introducing a structured approach for handling conflicting instructions based on their source's credibility.
Abstract: Today's LLMs are susceptible to prompt injections, jailbreaks, and other attacks that allow adversaries to overwrite a model's original instructions with their own malicious prompts. In this work, we argue that one of the primary vulnerabilities underlying these attacks is that LLMs often consider system prompts (e.g., text from an application developer) to be the same priority as text from untrusted users and third parties. To address this, we propose an instruction hierarchy that explicitly defines how models should behave when instructions of different priorities conflict. We then propose a data generation method to demonstrate this hierarchical instruction following behavior, which teaches LLMs to selectively ignore lower-privileged instructions. We apply this method to GPT-3.5, showing that it drastically increases robustness -- even for attack types not seen during training -- while imposing minimal degradations on standard capabilities.
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