Collin Zhang


2024

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Extracting Prompts by Inverting LLM Outputs
Collin Zhang | John Morris | Vitaly Shmatikov
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We consider the problem of language model inversion: given outputs of a language model, we seek to extract the prompt that generated these outputs. We develop a new black-box method, output2prompt, that extracts prompts without access to the model’s logits and without adversarial or jailbreaking queries. Unlike previous methods, output2prompt only needs outputs of normal user queries. To improve memory efficiency, output2prompt employs a new sparse encoding techique. We measure the efficacy of output2prompt on a variety of user and system prompts and demonstrate zero-shot transferability across different LLMs.