On the Availability Risks of Production LLM Services Under Unbounded Inference

Summary

Researchers introduce ThinkTrap, an input-space optimization framework that crafts prompts to trigger excessively long or non-terminating generation in LLM services, even under black-box access. Tests on several commercial closed-source LLM services showed consistently abnormal output lengths and response-side degradation. In controlled experiments on private LLM deployments, ThinkTrap cut service throughput to as low as 1% of original capacity and, in extreme cases, caused complete service failure from resource exhaustion.

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