Eric Wong

Why are LLM guardrails fundamentally so easily broken, and how can we enforce them? This talk formalizes a mechanistic theory for studying safety problems. We begin with one-layer transformers, identifying rule-breaking as an inherent architectural vulnerability in the model's attention mechanism. This mechanistic theory framework (LogicBreaks) taught us a critical lesson: if attention is the key to breaking rules, it may also be the key to enforcing them.

Building upon this insight, we expand the mechanistic theory to analyze attention-based interventions, arriving at InstaBoost: an incredibly simple yet highly effective steering method that boosts the model's attention on user-provided instructions during generation. This technique, developed from analysis on one-layer transformers, provides state-of-the-art control over large-scale LLMs with just five lines of code.