Papers › Adversarial Decoding: Generating Readable Documents for Adversarial Objectives

Adversarial Decoding: Generating Readable Documents for Adversarial Objectives

3 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.02163archive 2025-07-28

Collin Zhang, Tingwei Zhang, Vitaly Shmatikov

We design, implement, and evaluate adversarial decoding, a new, generic text generation technique that produces readable documents for different adversarial objectives. Prior methods either produce easily detectable gibberish, or cannot handle objectives that include embedding similarity. In particular, they only work for direct attacks (such as jailbreaking) and cannot produce adversarial text for realistic indirect injection, e.g., documents that (1) are retrieved in RAG systems in response to broad classes of queries, and also (2) adversarially influence subsequent generation. We also show that fluency (low perplexity) is not sufficient to evade filtering. We measure the effectiveness of adversarial decoding for different objectives, including RAG poisoning, jailbreaking, and evasion of defensive filters, and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods while producing readable adversarial documents.

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Adversarial TextRAGRetrievalText Generation

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBARTBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionRAGResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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