Read Over the Lines: Attacking LLMs and Toxicity Detection Systems with ASCII Art to Mask Profanity
<|reference_start|>Read Over the Lines: Attacking LLMs and Toxicity Detection Systems with ASCII Art to Mask Profanity: We introduce a novel family of adversarial attacks that exploit the inability of language models to interpret ASCII art. To evaluate these attacks, we propose the ToxASCII benchmark and develop two custom ASCII art fonts: one leveraging special tokens and another using text-filled letter shapes. Our attacks achieve a perfect 1.0 Attack Success Rate across ten models, including OpenAI's o1-preview and LLaMA 3.1.   Warning: this paper contains examples of toxic language used for research purposes.<|reference_end|>
@article{berezin2024read,
    title={Read Over the Lines: Attacking LLMs and Toxicity Detection Systems with
  ASCII Art to Mask Profanity},
    author={Sergey Berezin, Reza Farahbakhsh, Noel Crespi},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.18708},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.18708},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI cs.CR}
}