{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-engorgio-prompt-makes-large-language-model","title":"An Engorgio Prompt Makes Large Language Model Babble on","arxiv_id":"2412.19394","date":"2024-12-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jianshuo Dong","Ziyuan Zhang","Qingjie Zhang","Tianwei Zhang","Hao Wang","Hewu Li","Qi Li","Chao Zhang","Ke Xu","Han Qiu"],"abstract":"Auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) have yielded impressive performance in many real-world tasks. However, the new paradigm of these LLMs also exposes novel threats. In this paper, we explore their vulnerability to inference cost attacks, where a malicious user crafts Engorgio prompts to intentionally increase the computation cost and latency of the inference process. We design Engorgio, a novel methodology, to efficiently generate adversarial Engorgio prompts to affect the target LLM's service availability. Engorgio has the following two technical contributions. (1) We employ a parameterized distribution to track LLMs' prediction trajectory. (2) Targeting the auto-regressive nature of LLMs' inference process, we propose novel loss functions to stably suppress the appearance of the <EOS> token, whose occurrence will interrupt the LLM's generation process. We conduct extensive experiments on 13 open-sourced LLMs with parameters ranging from 125M to 30B. The results show that Engorgio prompts can successfully induce LLMs to generate abnormally long outputs (i.e., roughly 2-13$\\times$ longer to reach 90%+ of the output length limit) in a white-box scenario and our real-world experiment demonstrates Engergio's threat to LLM service with limited computing resources. The code is released at: https://github.com/jianshuod/Engorgio-prompt.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19394v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19394v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-engorgio-prompt-makes-large-language-model","repo_url":"https://github.com/jianshuod/engorgio-prompt","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"large-language-model","task_name":"Large Language Model"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":null}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2412.19394","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2412.19394"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/jianshuod/Engorgio-prompt","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/jianshuod/engorgio-prompt","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1,"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"219b1023bfef1613","entry":"fetch_model_size","repo":"jianshuod/engorgio-prompt","repo_kind":"official","path":"ica_utils/model.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jianshuod/engorgio-prompt/blob/HEAD/ica_utils/model.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"219b1023bfef1613"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"875043016598875b","entry":"generate_prompt","repo":"jianshuod/engorgio-prompt","repo_kind":"official","path":"ica_utils/prepare.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jianshuod/engorgio-prompt/blob/HEAD/ica_utils/prepare.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"875043016598875b"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}