With the increasing risk posed by jailbreak attacks, recent studies have investigated various methods to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs), mainly falling into two strategies: safety training and safeguards. Safety training involves fine-tuning the LLM with adversarial samples, which activate the LLM’s capabilities against jailbreak. However, it is not always effective in countering new attacks and often leads to potential performance degradation. Safeguards, on the other hand, are methods using additional models to filter harmful content from the LLM’s response. Nevertheless, they can only reduce a limited amount of harmful output and introduce extra computational costs. Given the distinct strengths and weaknesses of both, we combine them to balance out their flaws and propose a more effective method called Self-Guard.Specifically, we train the LLM to review its responses for any harmful content and append a [harmful] or [harmless] tag to the end of the response. In this way, Self-Guard possesses the advantages of safety training, leveraging the powerful capabilities of the LLMs themselves to detect harmfulness. Besides that, it gains flexibility like safeguards, making the safety check target the output side, which makes the system less vulnerable to attack updates. Experimental results indicate that our Self-Guard can effectively defend against jailbreak attacks and will not cause LLMs’ performance degradation.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are commonly evaluated using costly annotated multimodal benchmarks. However, these benchmarks often struggle to keep pace with the rapidly advancing requirements of MLLM evaluation. We propose GenCeption, a novel and annotation-free MLLM evaluation framework that merely requires unimodal data to assess inter-modality semantic coherence and inversely reflects the models’ inclination to hallucinate. Analogous to the popular DrawCeption game, GenCeption initiates with a non-textual sample and undergoes a series of iterative description and generation steps. Semantic drift across iterations is quantified using the GC@T metric. Our empirical findings validate GenCeption’s efficacy, showing strong correlations with popular MLLM benchmarking results. GenCeption may be extended to mitigate training data contamination by utilizing ubiquitous, previously unseen unimodal data.

Large Language Model (LLM) has gained popularity and achieved remarkable results in open-domain tasks, but its performance in real industrial domain-specific scenarios is average due to its lack of specific domain knowledge. This issue has attracted widespread attention, but there are few relevant benchmarks available. In this paper, we provide a benchmark Question Answering (QA) dataset named MSQA, centered around Microsoft products and IT technical problems encountered by customers. This dataset contains industry cloud-specific QA knowledge, an area not extensively covered in general LLMs, making it well-suited for evaluating methods aiming to enhance LLMs’ domain-specific capabilities. In addition, we propose a new model interaction paradigm that can empower LLM to achieve better performance on domain-specific tasks where it is not proficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the approach following our method outperforms the commonly used LLM with retrieval methods. We make our source code and sample data available at: https://aka.ms/Microsoft_QA.