Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Researchers found a approach to defeat the protection guardrails in GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo, unlocking the flexibility to generate dangerous and poisonous content material, basically beating a big language mannequin with one other giant language mannequin.

The researchers found that using tree-of-thought (ToT)reasoning to repeat and refine a line of assault was helpful for jailbreaking one other giant language mannequin.

What they discovered is that the ToT method was profitable towards GPT4, GPT4-Turbo, and PaLM-2, utilizing a remarkably low variety of queries to acquire a jailbreak, on common lower than thirty queries.

Tree Of Ideas Reasoning

A Google analysis paper from round Could 2022 found Chain of Thought Prompting.

Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting technique used on a generative AI to make it comply with a sequence of steps so as to remedy an issue and full a process. The CoT technique is commonly accompanied with examples to indicate the LLM how the steps work in a reasoning process.

So, quite than simply ask a generative AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT to do a process, the chain of thought technique instructs the AI tips on how to comply with a path of reasoning that’s composed of a collection of steps.

Tree of Ideas (ToT) reasoning, generally known as Tree of Thought (singular) is basically a variation and enchancment of CoT, however they’re two various things.

Tree of Ideas reasoning is just like CoT. The distinction is that quite than coaching a generative AI to comply with a single path of reasoning, ToT is constructed on a course of that permits for a number of paths in order that the AI can cease and self-assess then provide you with alternate steps.

Tree of Ideas reasoning was developed in Could 2023 in a analysis paper titled Tree of Ideas: Deliberate Downside Fixing with Massive Language Fashions (PDF)

The analysis paper describes Tree of Thought:

“…we introduce a brand new framework for language mannequin inference, Tree of Ideas (ToT), which generalizes over the favored Chain of Thought method to prompting language fashions, and permits exploration over coherent models of textual content (ideas) that function intermediate steps towards drawback fixing.

ToT permits LMs to carry out deliberate choice making by contemplating a number of completely different reasoning paths and self-evaluating decisions to determine the following plan of action, in addition to trying forward or backtracking when essential to make world decisions.

Our experiments present that ToT considerably enhances language fashions’ problem-solving skills…”

Tree Of Assaults With Pruning (TAP)

This new technique of jailbreaking giant language fashions known as Tree of Assaults with Pruning, TAP. TAP makes use of two LLMs, one for attacking and the opposite for evaluating.

TAP is ready to outperform different jailbreaking strategies by vital margins, solely requiring black-box entry to the LLM.

A black field, in computing, is the place one can see what goes into an algorithm and what comes out. However what occurs within the center is unknown, thus it’s mentioned to be in a black field.

Tree of ideas (TAP) reasoning is used towards a focused LLM like GPT-4 to repetitively attempt completely different prompting, assess the outcomes, then if obligatory change course if that try just isn’t promising.

That is known as a technique of iteration and pruning. Every prompting try is analyzed for the likelihood of success. If the trail of assault is judged to be a lifeless finish, the LLM will “prune” that path of assault and start one other and higher collection of prompting assaults.

That is why it’s known as a “tree” in that quite than utilizing a linear technique of reasoning which is the hallmark of chain of thought (CoT) prompting, tree of thought prompting is non-linear as a result of the reasoning course of branches off to different areas of reasoning, very similar to a human may do.

The attacker points a collection of prompts, the evaluator evaluates the responses to these prompts after which decides as to what the following path of assault can be by making a name as as to if the present path of assault is irrelevant or not, plus it additionally evaluates the outcomes to find out the probably success of prompts that haven’t but been tried.

What’s outstanding about this method is that this course of reduces the variety of prompts wanted to jailbreak GPT-4. Moreover, a better variety of jailbreaking prompts are found with TAP than with every other jailbreaking technique.

The researchers observe:

“On this work, we current Tree of Assaults with Pruning (TAP), an automatic technique for producing jailbreaks that solely requires black-box entry to the goal LLM.

TAP makes use of an LLM to iteratively refine candidate (assault) prompts utilizing tree-of-thoughts reasoning till one of many generated prompts jailbreaks the goal.

Crucially, earlier than sending prompts to the goal, TAP assesses them and prunes those unlikely to end in jailbreaks.

Utilizing tree-of-thought reasoning permits TAP to navigate a big search house of prompts and pruning reduces the entire variety of queries despatched to the goal.

In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (together with GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo) for greater than 80% of the prompts utilizing solely a small variety of queries. This considerably improves upon the earlier state-of-the-art black-box technique for producing jailbreaks.”

Tree Of Thought (ToT) Outperforms Chain Of Thought (CoT) Reasoning

One other fascinating conclusion reached within the analysis paper is that, for this explicit process, ToT reasoning outperforms CoT reasoning, even when including pruning to the CoT technique, the place off subject prompting is pruned and discarded.

ToT Underperforms With GPT 3.5 Turbo

The researchers found that ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo didn’t carry out properly with CoT, revealing the restrictions of GPT 3.5 Turbo. Really, GPT 3.5 carried out exceedingly poorly, dropping from 84% success fee to solely a 4.2% success fee.

That is their commentary about why GPT 3.5 underperforms:

“We observe that the selection of the evaluator can have an effect on the efficiency of TAP: altering the attacker from GPT4 to GPT3.5-Turbo reduces the success fee from 84% to 4.2%.

The rationale for the discount in success fee is that GPT3.5-Turbo incorrectly determines that the goal mannequin is jailbroken (for the offered objective) and, therefore, preemptively stops the tactic.

As a consequence, the variant sends considerably fewer queries than the unique technique…”

What This Imply For You

Whereas it’s amusing that the researchers use the ToT technique to beat an LLM with one other LLM, it additionally highlights the usefulness of ToT for producing shocking new instructions in prompting so as to obtain increased ranges of output.

• TL/DR Takeaways:
• Tree of Thought prompting outperformed Chain of Thought strategies
• GPT 3.5 labored considerably poorly compared to GPT 4 in ToT
• Pruning is a helpful a part of a prompting technique
• Analysis confirmed that ToT is superior to CoT in an intensive reasoning process like jailbreaking an LLM

Learn the unique analysis paper:

Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically (PDF)

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