Aidan Wong

Aidan Wong, He Cao, Zijing Liu et al.

The increasing integration of large language models (LLMs) across various fields has heightened concerns about their potential to propagate dangerous information. This paper specifically explores the security vulnerabilities of LLMs within the field of chemistry, particularly their capacity to provide instructions for synthesizing hazardous substances. We evaluate the effectiveness of several prompt injection attack methods, including red-teaming, explicit prompting, and implicit prompting. Additionally, we introduce a novel attack technique named SMILES-prompting, which uses the Simplified Molecular-Input Line-Entry System (SMILES) to reference chemical substances. Our findings reveal that SMILES-prompting can effectively bypass current safety mechanisms. These findings highlight the urgent need for enhanced domain-specific safeguards in LLMs to prevent misuse and improve their potential for positive social impact.

Weidi Luo, He Cao, Zijing Liu et al.

With the extensive deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring their safety has become increasingly critical. However, existing defense methods often struggle with two key issues: (i) inadequate defense capabilities, particularly in domain-specific scenarios like chemistry, where a lack of specialized knowledge can lead to the generation of harmful responses to malicious queries. (ii) over-defensiveness, which compromises the general utility and responsiveness of LLMs. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a multi-agents-based defense framework, Guide for Defense (G4D), which leverages accurate external information to provide an unbiased summary of user intentions and analytically grounded safety response guidance. Extensive experiments on popular jailbreak attacks and benign datasets show that our G4D can enhance LLM's robustness against jailbreak attacks on general and domain-specific scenarios without compromising the model's general functionality.