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Impact of Vertical ASCII-Art Arrangement on Recognition and Attack Efficacy

Determine whether arranging ASCII art characters vertically reduces large language models’ recognition accuracy on the Vision-in-Text Challenge-style recognition task to the extent that it induces uncertainty about the input prompt, thereby explaining the observed degradation in the effectiveness of the ArtPrompt jailbreak attack.

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Background

In ablation studies, the authors test a vertical arrangement of ASCII art characters and observe decreased attack effectiveness compared to the horizontal arrangement.

They conjecture that the vertical arrangement harms the model’s ability to perform the underlying recognition task, which increases uncertainty and reduces the effectiveness of the jailbreak. This explanatory mechanism is presented as a conjecture and remains to be validated.

References

We observe that vertical arrangment leads to degradation in effectiveness of ArtPrompt. We conjecture that the reason is that vertical arrangement significantly reduces the prediction accuracy of the recognition task, making the victim models uncertain about the input prompt.

— ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs (2402.11753 - Jiang et al., 19 Feb 2024) in Section 4.2 Experimental Results, paragraph "Ablation analysis of ArtPrompt" (following Table titled "This table presents our ablation analysis of ArtPrompt.")