With the emergence of more powerful large language models (LLMs), such as
ChatGPT and GPT-4, in-context learning (ICL) has gained significant prominence
in leveraging these models for specific tasks by utilizing data-label pairs as
precondition prompts. While incorporating demonstrations can greatly enhance
the performance of LLMs across various tasks, it may introduce a new security
concern: attackers can manipulate only the demonstrations without changing the
input to perform an attack. In this paper, we investigate the security concern
of ICL from an adversarial perspective, focusing on the impact of
demonstrations. We propose a novel attack method named advICL, which aims to
manipulate only the demonstration without changing the input to mislead the
models. Our results demonstrate that as the number of demonstrations increases,
the robustness of in-context learning would decrease. Additionally, we also
identify the intrinsic property of the demonstrations is that they can be used
(prepended) with different inputs. As a result, it introduces a more practical
threat model in which an attacker can attack the test input example even
without knowing and manipulating it. To achieve it, we propose the transferable
version of advICL, named Transferable-advICL. Our experiment shows that the
adversarial demonstration generated by Transferable-advICL can successfully
attack the unseen test input examples. We hope that our study reveals the
critical security risks associated with ICL and underscores the need for
extensive research on the robustness of ICL, particularly given its increasing
significance in the advancement of LLMs.