Dodging Latent Space Detectors: Obfuscated Activation Attacks with Luke, Erik, and Scott.
In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Nathan explores the groundbreaking paper on obfuscated activations with 3 members from the research team - Luke Bailey, Eric Jenner, and Scott Emmons. The team discusses how their work challenges latent-based defenses in AI systems, demonstrating methods to bypass safety mechanisms while maintaining harmful behaviors. Join us for an in-depth technical conversation about AI safety, interpretability, and the ongoing challenge of creating robust defense systems.
Do check out the "Obfuscated Activations Bypass LLM Latent-Space Defenses" paper here: https://obfuscated-activations.github.io/
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00:00) Teaser
(00:00:46) About the Episode
(00:05:11) Latent Space Defenses
(00:08:41) Sleeper Agents
(00:15:06) Three Case Studies (Part 1)
(00:17:02) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) | NetSuite
(00:19:42) Three Case Studies (Part 2)
(00:24:09) SQL Generation
(00:26:17) Understanding Defenses
(00:32:52) Out-of-Distribution Detection (Part 1)
(00:35:37) Sponsors: Shopify | Vanta
(00:38:52) Out-of-Distribution Detection (Part 2)
(00:45:13) Loss Function Weighting
(00:57:49) Who Moves Last?
(01:11:41) High-Level Triggers
(01:25:33) Open Source vs. Access
(01:38:57) Internalizing Reasoning
(01:53:07) Representing Concepts
(02:06:38) Final Thoughts
(02:09:33) Outro
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