Benchmarking Misuse Mitigation Against Covert Adversaries

Understand

Existing language model safety evaluations focus on overt attacks and low-stakes tasks.

• In reality, an attacker can easily subvert existing safeguards by requesting help on small, benign-seeming tasks across many independent queries.
• Because the individual queries do not appear harmful, the attack is hard to detect.
• However, when combined, these fragments uplift misuse by helping the attacker complete hard and dangerous tasks.