EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Xuandong Zhao
dblp:244/8033
· DBLP profile ↗
27ranked-venue papers
10as first author
26since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 26 · 9 first-author · 25 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | CodeHalu: Investigating Code Hallucinations in LLMs via Execution-based VerificationabstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in code generation, offering developers groundbreaking automated programming support. However, LLMs often generate code that is syntactically correct and even semantically plausible, but may not execute as expected or fulfill specified requirements. This phenomenon of hallucinations in the code domain has not been systematically explored. To advance the community's understanding and research on this issue, we introduce the concept of code hallucinations and propose a classification method for code hallucination based on execution verification. We categorize code hallucinations into four main types: mapping, naming, resource, and logic hallucinations, with each category further divided into different subcategories to understand and address the unique challenges faced by LLMs in code generation with finer granularity. Additionally, we present a dynamic detection algorithm called CodeHalu designed to detect and quantify code hallucinations. We also introduce the CodeHaluEval benchmark, which includes 8,883 samples from 699 tasks, to systematically and quantitatively evaluate code hallucinations. By evaluating 17 popular LLMs using this benchmark, we reveal significant differences in their accuracy and reliability in code generation, offering detailed insights for further improving the code generation capabilities of LLMs. Weixiang Yan, Qian Yang 0007, Xuandong Zhao, Qian Chen 0003, Wen Wang 0001, Dawn Song |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2025 | Efficiently Identifying Watermarked Segments in Mixed-Source TextsabstractText watermarks in large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to detect synthetic text, mitigating misuse cases like fake news and academic dishonesty. While existing watermarking detection techniques primarily focus on classifying entire documents as watermarked or not, they often neglect the common scenario of identifying individual watermark segments within longer, mixed-source documents. Drawing inspiration from plagiarism detection systems, we propose two novel methods for partial watermark detection. First, we develop a geometry cover detection framework aimed at determining whether there is a watermark segment in long text. Second, we introduce an adaptive online learning algorithm to pinpoint the precise location of watermark segments within the text. Evaluated on three popular watermarking techniques (KGW-Watermark, Unigram-Watermark, and Gumbel-Watermark), our approach achieves high accuracy, significantly outperforming baseline methods. Moreover, our framework is adaptable to other watermarking techniques, offering new insights for precise watermark detection. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/llm-watermark-location. Xuandong Zhao, Chenwen Liao, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003, Lei Li 0005 |
ACL (1) | 1 |
| 2025 | SafeKey: Amplifying Aha-Moment Insights for Safety ReasoningabstractLarge Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce a new generation paradigm of explicitly reasoning before answering, leading to remarkable improvements in complex tasks.However, they pose great safety risks against harmful queries and adversarial attacks.While recent mainstream safety efforts on LRMs, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), improve safety performance, we find that SFT-aligned models struggle to generalize to unseen jailbreak prompts.After thorough investigation of LRMs' generation, we identify a safety aha moment that can activate safety reasoning and lead to a safe response.This aha moment typically appears in the 'key sentence', which follows models' query understanding process and can indicate whether the model will proceed safely.Based on these insights, we propose SafeKey, including two complementary objectives to better activate the safety aha moment in the key sentence: (1) a Dual-Path Safety Head to enhance the safety signal in the model's internal representations before the key sentence, and (2) a Query-Mask Modeling objective to improve the models' attention on its query understanding, which has important safety hints.Experiments across multiple safety benchmarks demonstrate that our methods significantly improve safety generalization to a wide range of jailbreak attacks and out-of-distribution harmful prompts, lowering the average harmfulness rate by 9.6%, while maintaining general abilities.Our analysis reveals how SafeKey enhances safety by reshaping internal attention and improving the quality of hidden representations. Kaiwen Zhou 0002, Xuandong Zhao, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Aosong Feng, Dawn Song, Xin Wang 0061 |
EMNLP | 2 |
| 2025 | An Undetectable Watermark for Generative Image ModelsabstractWe present the first undetectable watermarking scheme for generative image models.
_Undetectability_ ensures that no efficient adversary can distinguish between watermarked and un-watermarked images, even after making many adaptive queries.
In particular, an undetectable watermark does not degrade image quality under any efficiently computable metric.
Our scheme works by selecting the initial latents of a diffusion model using a pseudorandom error-correcting code (Christ and Gunn, 2024), a strategy which guarantees undetectability and robustness. We experimentally demonstrate that our watermarks are quality-preserving and robust using Stable Diffusion 2.1.
Our experiments verify that, in contrast to _every prior scheme_ we tested, our watermark does not degrade image quality.
Our experiments also demonstrate robustness: existing watermark removal attacks fail to remove our watermark from images without significantly degrading the quality of the images.
Finally, we find that we can robustly encode 512 bits in our watermark, and up to 2500 bits when the images are not subjected to watermark removal attacks.
Our code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/PRC-Watermark. Sam Gunn, Xuandong Zhao, Dawn Song |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2025 | MMDT: Decoding the Trustworthiness and Safety of Multimodal Foundation ModelsabstractMultimodal foundation models (MMFMs) play a crucial role in various applications, including autonomous driving, healthcare, and virtual assistants. However, several studies have revealed vulnerabilities in these models, such as generating unsafe content by text-to-image models. Existing benchmarks on multimodal models either predominantly assess the helpfulness of these models, or only focus on limited perspectives such as fairness and privacy. In this paper, we present the first unified platform, MMDT (Multimodal DecodingTrust), designed to provide a comprehensive safety and trustworthiness evaluation for MMFMs. Our platform assesses models from multiple perspectives, including safety, hallucination, fairness/bias, privacy, adversarial robustness, and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. We have designed various evaluation scenarios and red teaming algorithms under different tasks for each perspective to generate challenging data, forming a high-quality benchmark. We evaluate a range of multimodal models using MMDT, and our findings reveal a series of vulnerabilities and areas for improvement across these perspectives. This work introduces the first comprehensive and unique safety and trustworthiness evaluation platform for MMFMs, paving the way for developing safer and more reliable MMFMs and systems. Our platform and benchmark are available at https://mmdecodingtrust.github.io/. Chejian Xu, Jiawei Zhang 0013, Zhaorun Chen, Chulin Xie, Mintong Kang, Yujin Potter, Zhun Wang, Zhuowen Yuan, Alexander Xiong, Zidi Xiong, Lingzhi Yuan, Yi Zeng 0005, Peiyang Xu, Chengquan Guo, Andy Zhou, Jeffrey Ziwei Tan, Xuandong Zhao, Francesco Pinto, Zhen Xiang |
ICLR | 18 |
| 2025 | Permute-and-Flip: An optimally stable and watermarkable decoder for LLMsabstractIn this paper, we propose a new decoding method called Permute-and-Flip (PF) decoder. It enjoys stability properties similar to the standard sampling decoder, but is provably up to 2x better in its quality-stability tradeoff than sampling and never worse than any other decoder. We also design a cryptographic watermarking scheme analogous to Aaronson (2023)'s Gumbel watermark, but naturally tailored for PF decoder. The watermarking scheme does not change the distribution to sample, while allowing arbitrarily low false positive rate and high recall whenever the generated text has high entropy. Our experiments show that the PF decoder (and its watermarked counterpart) significantly outperform(s) naive sampling (and its Gumbel watermarked counterpart) in terms of perplexity, while retaining the same stability (and detectability), hence making it a promising new approach for LLM decoding. The code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/pf-decoding Xuandong Zhao, Lei Li 0005, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003 |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2025 | Multimodal Situational SafetyabstractMultimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are rapidly evolving, demonstrating impressive capabilities as multimodal assistants that interact with both humans and their environments. However, this increased sophistication introduces significant safety concerns. In this paper, we present the first evaluation and analysis of a novel safety challenge termed Multimodal Situational Safety, which explores how safety considerations vary based on the specific situation in which the user or agent is engaged.
We argue that for an MLLM to respond safely—whether through language or action—it often needs to assess the safety implications of a language query within its corresponding visual context.
To evaluate this capability, we develop the Multimodal Situational Safety benchmark (MSSBench) to assess the situational safety performance of current MLLMs.
The dataset comprises 1,960 language query-image pairs, half of which the image context is safe, and the other half is unsafe.
We also develop an evaluation framework that analyzes key safety aspects, including explicit safety reasoning, visual understanding, and, crucially, situational safety reasoning.
Our findings reveal that current MLLMs struggle with this nuanced safety problem in the instruction-following setting and struggle to tackle these situational safety challenges all at once, highlighting a key area for future research.
Furthermore, we develop multi-agent pipelines to coordinately solve safety challenges, which shows consistent improvement in safety over the original MLLM response. Kaiwen Zhou 0002, Xuandong Zhao, Anderson Compalas, Dawn Song, Xin Wang 0061 |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | DIS-CO: Discovering Copyrighted Content in VLMs Training Dataabstract*How can we verify whether copyrighted content was used to train a large vision-language model (VLM) without direct access to its training data?* Motivated by the hypothesis that a VLM is able to recognize images from its training corpus, we propose DIS-CO, a novel approach to infer the inclusion of copyrighted content during the model's development. By repeatedly querying a VLM with specific frames from targeted copyrighted material, DIS-CO extracts the content's identity through free-form text completions. To assess its effectiveness, we introduce MovieTection, a benchmark comprising 14,000 frames paired with detailed captions, drawn from films released both before and after a model’s training cutoff. Our results show that DIS-CO significantly improves detection performance, nearly doubling the average AUC of the best prior method on models with logits available. Our findings also highlight a broader concern: all tested models appear to have been exposed to some extent to copyrighted content. We provide the code in the supplementary materials. André V. Duarte, Xuandong Zhao, Arlindo L. Oliveira, Lei Li 0005 |
ICML | 2 |
| 2025 | Improving LLM Safety Alignment with Dual-Objective OptimizationabstractExisting training-time safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely deployed alignment method, exhibits limitations in both experimental and theoretical contexts as its loss function proves suboptimal for refusal learning. Through gradient-based analysis, we identify these shortcomings and propose an improved safety alignment that disentangles DPO objectives into two components: (1) robust refusal training, which encourages refusal even when partial unsafe generations are produced, and (2) targeted unlearning of harmful knowledge. This approach significantly increases LLM robustness against a wide range of jailbreak attacks, including prefilling, suffix, and multi-turn attacks across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a method to emphasize critical refusal tokens by incorporating a reward-based token-level weighting mechanism for refusal learning, which further improves the robustness against adversarial exploits. Our research also suggests that robustness to jailbreak attacks is correlated with token distribution shifts in the training process and internal representations of refusal and harmful tokens, offering valuable directions for future research in LLM safety alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/wicai24/DOOR-Alignment. Xuandong Zhao, Will Cai, Tianneng Shi, Licong Lin, Song Mei, Dawn Song |
ICML | 1 |
| 2025 | Weak-to-Strong Jailbreaking on Large Language ModelsabstractLarge language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks -- resulting in harmful, unethical, or biased text generations. However, existing jailbreaking methods are computationally costly. In this paper, we propose the **weak-to-strong** jailbreaking attack, an efficient inference time attack for aligned LLMs to produce harmful text. Our key intuition is based on the observation that jailbroken and aligned models only differ in their initial decoding distributions. The weak-to-strong attack's key technical insight is using two smaller models (a safe and an unsafe one) to adversarially modify a significantly larger safe model's decoding probabilities. We evaluate the weak-to-strong attack on 5 diverse open-source LLMs from 3 organizations. The results show our method can increase the misalignment rate to over 99\% on two datasets with just one forward pass per example. Our study exposes an urgent safety issue that needs to be addressed when aligning LLMs. As an initial attempt, we propose a defense strategy to protect against such attacks, but creating more advanced defenses remains challenging. The code for replicating the method is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/weak-to-strong. Xuandong Zhao, Xianjun Yang, Tianyu Pang, Lei Li 0005, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003, William Yang Wang |
ICML | 1 |
| 2025 | OVERT: A Benchmark for Over-Refusal Evaluation on Text-to-Image ModelsabstractText-to-Image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable success in generating visual content from text inputs. Although multiple safety alignment strategies have been proposed to prevent harmful outputs, they often lead to overly cautious behavior---rejecting even benign prompts---a phenomenon known as \textit{over-refusal} that reduces the practical utility of T2I models. Despite over-refusal having been observed in practice, there is no large-scale benchmark that systematically evaluates this phenomenon for T2I models. In this paper, we present an automatic workflow to construct synthetic evaluation data, resulting in OVERT (\textbf{OVE}r-\textbf{R}efusal evaluation on \textbf{T}ext-to-image models), the first large-scale benchmark for assessing over-refusal behaviors in T2I models. OVERT includes 4,600 seemingly harmful but benign prompts across nine safety-related categories, along with 1,785 genuinely harmful prompts (OVERT-unsafe) to evaluate the safety–utility trade-off. Using OVERT, we evaluate several leading T2I models and find that over-refusal is a widespread issue across various categories (Figure 1), underscoring the need for further research to enhance the safety alignment of T2I models without compromising their functionality. As a preliminary attempt to reduce over-refusal, we explore prompt rewriting; however, we find it often compromises faithfulness to the meaning of the original prompts.Finally, we demonstrate the flexibility of our generation framework in accommodating diverse safety requirements by generating customized evaluation data adapting to user-defined policies. Yixiao Huang 0004, Somayeh Sojoudi, Xuandong Zhao, Dawn Song, Song Mei |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2025 | A Technical Report on "Erasing the Invisible": The 2024 NeurIPS Competition on Stress Testing Image WatermarksabstractAI-generated images have become pervasive, raising critical concerns around content authenticity, intellectual property, and the spread of misinformation. Invisible watermarks offer a promising solution for identifying AI-generated images, preserving content provenance without degrading visual quality. However, their real-world robustness remains uncertain due to the lack of standardized evaluation protocols and large-scale stress testing. To bridge this gap, we organized “Erasing the Invisible,” a NeurIPS 2024 competition and newly established benchmark designed to systematically stress testing the resilience of watermarking techniques. The competition introduced two attack tracks—Black-box and Beige-box—that simulate practical scenarios with varying levels of attacker knowledge on watermarks, providing a comprehensive assessment of watermark robustness. The competition attracted significant global participation, with 2,722 submissions from 298 teams. Through a rigorous evaluation pipeline featuring real-time feedback and human-verified final rankings, participants developed and demonstrated new attack strategies that revealed critical vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art watermarking methods. On average, the top-5 teams in both tracks could remove watermarks from $\geq$ 89% of the images while preserving high visual quality, setting strong baselines for future research on watermark attacks and defenses. To support continued progress in this field, we summarize the insights and lessons learned from this competition in this paper, and release the benchmark dataset, evaluation toolkit, and competition results. “Erasing the Invisible” establishes a valuable open resource for advancing more robust watermarking techniques and strengthening content provenance in the era of generative AI. Mucong Ding, Bang An 0001, Tahseen Rabbani, Chenghao Deng, Anirudh Satheesh, Souradip Chakraborty, Mehrdad Saberi, Yuxin Wen, Kyle Sang, Aakriti Agrawal, Xuandong Zhao, Mary-Anne Hartley, Lei Li 0005, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003, Vishal M. Patel, Soheil Feizi, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang |
NeurIPS | 11 |
| 2025 | Scalable Best-of-N Selection for Large Language Models via Self-CertaintyabstractBest-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models for response evaluation and selection. Reward-free alternatives, like self-consistency and universal self-consistency, are limited in their ability to handle open-ended generation tasks or scale effectively. To address these limitations, we propose self-certainty, a novel and efficient metric that leverages the inherent probability distribution of LLM outputs to estimate response quality without requiring external reward models. We hypothesize that higher distributional self-certainty, aggregated across multiple samples, correlates with improved response accuracy, as it reflects greater confidence in the generated output. Through extensive experiments on various reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that self-certainty (1) scales effectively with increasing sample size $N$, akin to reward models but without the computational overhead; (2) complements chain-of-thought, improving reasoning performance beyond greedy decoding; and (3) generalizes to open-ended tasks where traditional self-consistency methods fall short. Our findings establish self-certainty as a practical and efficient way for improving LLM reasoning capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/backprop07/Self-Certainty Zhewei Kang, Xuandong Zhao, Dawn Song |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | SoK: Watermarking for AI-Generated ContentabstractAs the outputs of generative AI (GenAl) techniques improve in quality, it becomes increasingly challenging to distinguish them from human-created content. Watermarking schemes are a promising approach to address the problem of distinguishing between AI and human-generated content. These schemes embed hidden signals within AI -generated content to enable reliable detection. While watermarking is not a silver bullet for addressing all risks associated with GenAl, it can play a crucial role in enhancing AI safety and trustworthiness by combating misinformation and deception. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of water-marking techniques for GenAl, beginning with the need for watermarking from historical and regulatory perspectives. We formalize the definitions and desired properties of watermarking schemes and examine the key objectives and threat models for existing approaches. Practical evaluation strategies are also explored, providing insights into the development of robust watermarking techniques capable of resisting various attacks. Additionally, we review recent representative works, highlight open challenges, and discuss potential directions for this emerging field. By offering a thorough understanding of watermarking in GenAl, this work aims to guide researchers in advancing watermarking methods and applications, and support policymakers in addressing the broader implications of GenAl. Xuandong Zhao, Sam Gunn, Miranda Christ, Jaiden Fairoze, Andrés Fábrega, Nicholas Carlini, Sanjam Garg, Sanghyun Hong 0001, Milad Nasr, Florian Tramèr, Somesh Jha, Lei Li 0005, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003, Dawn Song |
SP | 1 |
| 2024 | GumbelSoft: Diversified Language Model Watermarking via the GumbelMax-trickabstractLarge language models (LLMs) excellently generate human-like text, but also raise concerns about misuse in fake news and academic dishonesty.Decoding-based watermark, particularly the GumbelMax-trick-based watermark (GM watermark), is a standout solution for safeguarding machine-generated texts due to its notable detectability.However, GM watermark encounters a major challenge with generation diversity, always yielding identical outputs for the same prompt, negatively impacting generation diversity and user experience.To overcome this limitation, we propose a new type of GM watermark, the Logits-Addition watermark, and its three variants, specifically designed to enhance diversity.Among these, the GumbelSoft watermark (a softmax variant of the Logits-Addition watermark) demonstrates superior performance in high diversity settings, with its AUROC score outperforming those of the two alternative variants by 0.1 to 0.3 and surpassing other decoding-based watermarking methods by a minimum of 0.1.1 Jiayi Fu, Xuandong Zhao, Ruihan Yang, Yuansen Zhang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao |
ACL (1) | 2 |
| 2024 | Pride and Prejudice: LLM Amplifies Self-Bias in Self-RefinementabstractRecent studies show that large language models (LLMs) improve their performance through self-feedback on certain tasks while degrade on others.We discovered that such a contrary is due to LLM's bias in evaluating their own output.In this paper, we formally define LLM's self-bias -the tendency to favor its own generation -using two statistics.We analyze six LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Gemini, LLaMA2, Mixtral and DeepSeek) on translation, constrained text generation, and mathematical reasoning tasks.We find that self-bias is prevalent in all examined LLMs across multiple languages and tasks.Our analysis reveals that while the self-refine pipeline improves the fluency and understandability of model outputs, it further amplifies self-bias.To mitigate such biases, we discover that larger model size and external feedback with accurate assessment can significantly reduce bias in the self-refine pipeline, leading to actual performance improvement in downstream tasks.The code and data are released at https://github. com/xu1998hz/llm_self_bias. Wenda Xu, Guanglei Zhu, Xuandong Zhao, Liangming Pan, Lei Li 0005, William Yang Wang |
ACL (1) | 3 |
| 2024 | Provable Robust Watermarking for AI-Generated TextabstractWe study the problem of watermarking large language models (LLMs) generated text — one of the most promising approaches for addressing the safety challenges of LLM usage. In this paper, we propose a rigorous theoretical framework to quantify the effectiveness and robustness of LLM watermarks. We propose a robust and high-quality watermark method, Unigram-Watermark, by extending an existing approach with a simplified fixed grouping strategy. We prove that our watermark method enjoys guaranteed generation quality, correctness in watermark detection, and is robust against text editing and paraphrasing. Experiments on three varying LLMs and two datasets verify that our Unigram-Watermark achieves superior detection accuracy and comparable generation quality in perplexity, thus promoting the responsible use of LLMs. Xuandong Zhao, Prabhanjan Vijendra Ananth, Lei Li 0005, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003 |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2024 | DE-COP: Detecting Copyrighted Content in Language Models Training Dataabstract*How can we detect if copyrighted content was used in the training process of a language model, considering that the training data is typically undisclosed?* We are motivated by the premise that a language model is likely to identify verbatim excerpts from its training text. We propose DE-COP, a method to determine whether a piece of copyrighted content is included in training. DE-COP's core approach is to probe an LLM with multiple-choice questions, whose options include both verbatim text and their paraphrases. We construct BookTection, a benchmark with excerpts from 165 books published prior and subsequent to a model's training cutoff, along with their paraphrases. Our experiments show that DE-COP outperforms the prior best method by 8.6% in detection accuracy (AUC) on models with logits available. Moreover, DE-COP also achieves an average accuracy of 72% for detecting suspect books on fully black-box models where prior methods give approximately 0% accuracy. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/DE-COP. André V. Duarte, Xuandong Zhao, Arlindo L. Oliveira, Lei Li 0005 |
ICML | 2 |
| 2024 | Monitoring AI-Modified Content at Scale: A Case Study on the Impact of ChatGPT on AI Conference Peer ReviewsabstractWe present an approach for estimating the fraction of text in a large corpus which is likely to be substantially modified or produced by a large language model (LLM). Our maximum likelihood model leverages expert-written and AI-generated reference texts to accurately and efficiently examine real-world LLM-use at the corpus level. We apply this approach to a case study of scientific peer review in AI conferences that took place after the release of ChatGPT: *ICLR* 2024, *NeurIPS* 2023, *CoRL* 2023 and *EMNLP* 2023. Our results suggest that between 6.5% and 16.9% of text submitted as peer reviews to these conferences could have been substantially modified by LLMs, i.e. beyond spell-checking or minor writing updates. The circumstances in which generated text occurs offer insight into user behavior: the estimated fraction of LLM-generated text is higher in reviews which report lower confidence, were submitted close to the deadline, and from reviewers who are less likely to respond to author rebuttals. We also observe corpus-level trends in generated text which may be too subtle to detect at the individual level, and discuss the implications of such trends on peer review. We call for future interdisciplinary work to examine how LLM use is changing our information and knowledge practices. Weixin Liang, Zachary Izzo, Haley Lepp, Hancheng Cao, Xuandong Zhao, Lingjiao Chen, Haotian Ye, Daniel A. McFarland, James Zou 0001 |
ICML | 6 |
| 2024 | Bileve: Securing Text Provenance in Large Language Models Against Spoofing with Bi-level SignatureabstractText watermarks for large language models (LLMs) have been commonly used to identify the origins of machine-generated content, which is promising for assessing liability when combating deepfake or harmful content. While existing watermarking techniques typically prioritize robustness against removal attacks, unfortunately, they are vulnerable to spoofing attacks: malicious actors can subtly alter the meanings of LLM-generated responses or even forge harmful content, potentially misattributing blame to the LLM developer. To overcome this, we introduce a bi-level signature scheme, Bileve, which embeds fine-grained signature bits for integrity checks (mitigating spoofing attacks) as well as a coarse-grained signal to trace text sources when the signature is invalid (enhancing detectability) via a novel rank-based sampling strategy. Compared to conventional watermark detectors that only output binary results, Bileve can differentiate 5 scenarios during detection, reliably tracing text provenance and regulating LLMs. The experiments conducted on OPT-1.3B and LLaMA-7B demonstrate the effectiveness of Bileve in defeating spoofing attacks with enhanced detectability. Tong Zhou 0002, Xuandong Zhao, Xiaolin Xu 0001, Shaolei Ren |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2024 | Invisible Image Watermarks Are Provably Removable Using Generative AIabstractInvisible watermarks safeguard images' copyrights by embedding hidden messages only detectable by owners. They also prevent people from misusing images, especially those generated by AI models.
We propose a family of regeneration attacks to remove these invisible watermarks.
The proposed attack method first adds random noise to an image to destroy the watermark and then reconstructs the image.
This approach is flexible and can be instantiated with many existing image-denoising algorithms and pre-trained generative models such as diffusion models. Through formal proofs and extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that pixel-level invisible watermarks are vulnerable to this regeneration attack.
Our results reveal that, across four different pixel-level watermarking schemes, the proposed method consistently achieves superior performance compared to existing attack techniques, with lower detection rates and higher image quality.
However, watermarks that keep the image semantically similar can be an alternative defense against our attacks.
Our finding underscores the need for a shift in research/industry emphasis from invisible watermarks to semantic-preserving watermarks. Code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/WatermarkAttacker Xuandong Zhao, Kexun Zhang, Zihao Su, Saastha Vasan, Ilya Grishchenko, Christopher Krügel, Giovanni Vigna, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003, Lei Li 0005 |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2023 | Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fully Zero-Shot LearnersabstractHow can we extend a pre-trained model to many language understanding tasks, without labeled or additional unlabeled data?Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been effective for a wide range of NLP tasks.However, existing approaches either require fine-tuning on downstream labeled datasets or manually constructing proper prompts.In this paper, we propose nonparametric prompting PLM (NPPrompt) for fully zero-shot language understanding.Unlike previous methods, NPPrompt uses only pre-trained language models and does not require any labeled data or additional raw corpus for further fine-tuning, nor does it rely on humans to construct a comprehensive set of prompt label words.We evaluate NPPrompt against previous major fewshot and zero-shot learning methods on diverse NLP tasks: text classification, text entailment, similar text retrieval, paraphrasing, and multiple-choice question answering.Experimental results demonstrate that our NPPrompt outperforms the previous best fully zero-shot method by big margins, with absolute gains of 12.8% in accuracy on text classification and 15.6% on the GLUE benchmark. Xuandong Zhao, Siqi Ouyang, Lei Li 0005 |
ACL (1) | 1 |
| 2023 | Protecting Language Generation Models via Invisible WatermarkingabstractLanguage generation models have been an increasingly powerful enabler to many applications. Many such models offer free or affordable API access which makes them potentially vulnerable to model extraction attacks through distillation. To protect intellectual property (IP) and make fair use of these models, various techniques such as lexical watermarking and synonym replacement have been proposed. However, these methods can be nullified by obvious countermeasures such as ``synonym randomization''. To address this issue, we propose GINSW, a novel method to protect text generation models from being stolen through distillation. The key idea of our method is to inject secret signals into the probability vector of the decoding steps for each target token. We can then detect the secret message by probing a suspect model to tell if it is distilled from the protected one. Experimental results show that GINSW can effectively identify instances of IP infringement with minimal impact on the generation quality of protected APIs. Our method demonstrates an absolute improvement of 19 to 29 points on mean average precision (mAP) in detecting suspects compared to previous methods against watermark removal attacks. Xuandong Zhao, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003, Lei Li 0005 |
ICML | 1 |
| 2023 | Private Prediction Strikes Back! Private Kernelized Nearest Neighbors with Individual Rényi FilterabstractMost existing approaches of differentially private (DP) machine learning focus on private training. Despite its many advantages, private training lacks the flexibility in adapting to incremental changes to the training dataset such as deletion requests from exercising GDPR’s right to be forgotten. We revisit a long-forgotten alternative, known as private prediction, and propose a new algorithm named Individual Kernelized Nearest Neighbor (Ind-KNN). Ind-KNN is easily updatable over dataset changes and it allows precise control of the Rényi DP at an individual user level — a user’s privacy loss is measured by the exact amount of her contribution to predictions; and a user is removed if her prescribed privacy budget runs out. Our results show that Ind-KNN consistently improves the accuracy over existing private prediction methods for a wide range of epsilon on four vision and language tasks. We also illustrate several cases under which Ind-KNN is preferable over private training with NoisySGD. Yuqing Zhu 0005, Xuandong Zhao, Chuan Guo 0001, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003 |
UAI | 2 |
| 2022 | Provably Confidential Language ModellingabstractLarge language models are shown to memorize privacy information such as social security numbers in training data.Given the sheer scale of the training corpus, it is challenging to screen and filter all privacy data, either manually or automatically.In this paper, we propose Confidentially Redacted Training (CRT), a method to train language generation models while protecting the confidential segments.We borrow ideas from differential privacy (which solves a related but distinct problem) and show that our method is able to provably prevent unintended memorization by randomizing parts of the training process.Moreover, we show that redaction with an approximately correct screening policy amplifies the confidentiality guarantee.We implement the method for both LSTM and GPT language models.Our experimental results show that the models trained by CRT obtain almost the same perplexity while preserving strong confidentiality 1 . Xuandong Zhao, Lei Li 0005, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003 |
NAACL-HLT | 1 |
| 2021 | An Optimal Reduction of TV-Denoising to Adaptive Online LearningabstractWe consider the problem of estimating a function from $n$ noisy samples whose discrete Total Variation (TV) is bounded by $C_n$. We reveal a deep connection to the seemingly disparate problem of \emph{Strongly Adaptive} online learning [Daniely et al 2015] and provide an $O(n \log n)$ time algorithm that attains the near minimax optimal rate of $\tilde O (n^{1/3}C_n^{2/3})$ under squared error loss. The resulting algorithm runs online and optimally \emph{adapts} to the \emph{unknown} smoothness parameter $C_n$. This leads to a new and more versatile alternative to wavelets-based methods for (1) adaptively estimating TV bounded functions; (2) online forecasting of TV bounded trends in time series. Dheeraj Baby, Xuandong Zhao, Yu-Xiang Wang 0003 |
AISTATS | 2 |
| 2019 | Predicting Alzheimer's Disease by Hierarchical Graph Convolution from Positron Emission Tomography ImagingabstractImaging-based early diagnosis of Alzheimer Disease (AD) has become an effective approach, especially by using nuclear medicine imaging techniques such as Positron Emission Topography (PET). In various literature it has been found that PET images can be better modeled as signals (e.g. uptake of florbetapir) defined on a network (non-Euclidean) structure which is governed by its underlying graph patterns of pathological progression and metabolic connectivity. In order to effectively apply deep learning framework for PET image analysis to overcome its limitation on Euclidean grid, we develop a solution for 3D PET image representation and analysis under a generalized, graph-based CNN architecture (PETNet), which analyzes PET signals defined on a group-wise inferred graph structure. Computations in PETNet are defined in non-Euclidean, graph (network) domain, as it performs feature extraction by convolution operations on spectral-filtered signals on the graph and pooling operations based on hierarchical graph clustering. Effectiveness of the PETNet is evaluated on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, which shows improved performance over both deep learning and other machine learning-based methods. Jiaming Guo, Xiang Li 0001, Xuandong Zhao, Quanzheng Li |
IEEE BigData | 4 |