Tutorial on AI Alignment (part 1 of 2): Safety Vulnerabilities of Current Frontier Models

Ahmad Beirami, Google DeepMind
Hamed Hassani, University of Pennsylvania

In recent years, large language models have been used to solve a multitude of natural language tasks. In the first part of the tutorial, we start by giving a brief overview of the history of language modeling and the fundamental techniques that led to the development of the modern language models behind Claude, Gemini, GPT, and Llama. We then dive into the safety failure modes of the current frontier models. Specifically, we will explain that, despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, popular LLMs are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. We review the current state of the jailbreaking literature, including new questions about robust generalization, discussions of open-box and black-box attacks on LLMs, defenses against jailbreaking attacks, and a new leaderboard to evaluate the robust generalization of production LLMs.

The focus of the first session will be mostly on safety vulnerabilities of the frontier LLMs. In the second session, we will focus on the current methodologies that aim to mitigate these vulnerabilities and more generally align language models with human standards.