Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised
  Smoothing
Jiabao Ji Bairu Hou Zhen Zhang Guanhua Zhang Wenqi Fan Qing Li Yang Zhang Gaowen Liu Sijia Liu Shiyu Chang
Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success,
their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations, including recent jailbreak
attacks, has raised considerable concerns. However, the increasing size of
these models and their limited access make improving their robustness a
challenging task. Among various defense strategies, randomized smoothing has
shown great potential for LLMs, as it does not require full access to the
model's parameters or fine-tuning via adversarial training. However, randomized
smoothing involves adding noise to the input before model prediction, and the
final model's robustness largely depends on the model's performance on these
noise corrupted data. Its effectiveness is often limited by the model's
sub-optimal performance on noisy data. To address this issue, we propose to
leverage the multitasking nature of LLMs to first denoise the noisy inputs and
then to make predictions based on these denoised versions. We call this
procedure self-denoised smoothing. Unlike previous denoised smoothing
techniques in computer vision, which require training a separate model to
enhance the robustness of LLMs, our method offers significantly better
efficiency and flexibility. Our experimental results indicate that our method
surpasses existing methods in both empirical and certified robustness in
defending against adversarial attacks for both downstream tasks and human
alignments (i.e., jailbreak attacks). Our code is publicly available at
https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/SelfDenoise