Reasoning Robustness of LLMs to Adversarial Typographical Errors

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05345v1
• Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:54:05 GMT
• Title: Reasoning Robustness of LLMs to Adversarial Typographical Errors
• Authors: Esther Gan, Yiran Zhao, Liying Cheng, Yancan Mao, Anirudh Goyal, Kenji Kawaguchi, Min-Yen Kan, Michael Shieh,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. We study the reasoning robustness of LLMs to typographical errors, which can naturally occur in users' queries. We design an Adversarial Typo Attack ($texttATA$) algorithm that iteratively samples typos for words that are important to the query and selects the edit that is most likely to succeed in attacking.
• Score: 49.99118660264703
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• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, CoT can be biased by users' instruction. In this work, we study the reasoning robustness of LLMs to typographical errors, which can naturally occur in users' queries. We design an Adversarial Typo Attack ($\texttt{ATA}$) algorithm that iteratively samples typos for words that are important to the query and selects the edit that is most likely to succeed in attacking. It shows that LLMs are sensitive to minimal adversarial typographical changes. Notably, with 1 character edit, Mistral-7B-Instruct's accuracy drops from 43.7% to 38.6% on GSM8K, while with 8 character edits the performance further drops to 19.2%. To extend our evaluation to larger and closed-source LLMs, we develop the $\texttt{R$^2$ATA}$ benchmark, which assesses models' $\underline{R}$easoning $\underline{R}$obustness to $\underline{\texttt{ATA}}$. It includes adversarial typographical questions derived from three widely used reasoning datasets-GSM8K, BBH, and MMLU-by applying $\texttt{ATA}$ to open-source LLMs. $\texttt{R$^2$ATA}$ demonstrates remarkable transferability and causes notable performance drops across multiple super large and closed-source LLMs.

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