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Backdoor attacks pose a significant security threat to natural language processing (NLP) systems, but existing methods lack explainable trigger mechanisms and fail to quantitatively model vulnerability patterns. This work pioneers the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Gejian Zhao , Hanzhou Wu , Xinpeng Zhang

Backdoor data poisoning, inserted within instruction examples used to fine-tune a foundation Large Language Model (LLM) for downstream tasks (\textit{e.g.,} sentiment prediction), is a serious security concern due to the evasive nature of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Jayaram Raghuram , George Kesidis , David J. Miller

Machine learning backdoors have the property that the machine learning model should work as expected on normal inputs, but when the input contains a specific $\textit{trigger}$, it behaves as the attacker desires. Detecting such triggers…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Eirik Høyheim , Magnus Wiik Eckhoff , Gudmund Grov , Robert Flood , David Aspinall

Poisoning of data sets is a potential security threat to large language models that can lead to backdoored models. A description of the internal mechanisms of backdoored language models and how they process trigger inputs, e.g., when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Max Lamparth , Anka Reuel

Backdoor attacks manipulate model predictions by inserting innocuous triggers into training and test data. We focus on more realistic and more challenging clean-label attacks where the adversarial training examples are correctly labeled.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Wencong You , Zayd Hammoudeh , Daniel Lowd

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to neural networks, enabling adversaries to manipulate model outputs on specific inputs, often with devastating consequences, especially in critical applications. While backdoor attacks have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Zhen Guo , Abhinav Kumar , Reza Tourani

Machine learning is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. Previous literature has demonstrated that at the training stage attackers can manipulate data and data sampling procedures to control model behaviour. A common attack goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Mikel Bober-Irizar , Ilia Shumailov , Yiren Zhao , Robert Mullins , Nicolas Papernot

Backdoors implanted in pre-trained language models (PLMs) can be transferred to various downstream tasks, which exposes a severe security threat. However, most existing backdoor attacks against PLMs are un-targeted and task-specific. Few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Wei Du , Peixuan Li , Boqun Li , Haodong Zhao , Gongshen Liu

Modern NLP models are often trained over large untrusted datasets, raising the potential for a malicious adversary to compromise model behaviour. For instance, backdoors can be implanted through crafting training instances with a specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Xuanli He , Qiongkai Xu , Jun Wang , Benjamin Rubinstein , Trevor Cohn

With the widespread use of deep learning system in many applications, the adversary has strong incentive to explore vulnerabilities of deep neural networks and manipulate them. Backdoor attacks against deep neural networks have been…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Jiazhu Dai , Chuanshuai Chen

Backdoor attack is a major threat to deep learning systems in safety-critical scenarios, which aims to trigger misbehavior of neural network models under attacker-controlled conditions. However, most backdoor attacks have to modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Yizhen Yuan , Rui Kong , Shenghao Xie , Yuanchun Li , Yunxin Liu

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are used for text-related tasks such as classification and generation. To complete these tasks, input data is first tokenized from human-readable text into a format the model can understand, enabling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Kasimir Schulz , Kenneth Yeung , Kieran Evans

In the field of natural language processing, the prevalent approach involves fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) using local samples. Recent research has exposed the susceptibility of PLMs to backdoor attacks, wherein the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Ruixiang Tang , Jiayi Yuan , Yiming Li , Zirui Liu , Rui Chen , Xia Hu

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models based on Machine Learning (ML) are susceptible to adversarial attacks -- malicious algorithms that imperceptibly modify input text to force models into making incorrect predictions. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Salijona Dyrmishi , Salah Ghamizi , Maxime Cordy

Several years of research have shown that machine-learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial examples, both in theory and in practice. Until now, such attacks have primarily targeted visual models, exploiting the gap between human and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Nicholas Boucher , Ilia Shumailov , Ross Anderson , Nicolas Papernot

Large language models (LLMs) have acquired the ability to handle longer context lengths and understand nuances in text, expanding their dialogue capabilities beyond a single utterance. A popular user-facing application of LLMs is the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Terry Tong , Jiashu Xu , Qin Liu , Muhao Chen

Backdoor attacks on deep neural networks have emerged as significant security threats, especially as DNNs are increasingly deployed in security-critical applications. However, most existing works assume that the attacker has access to the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Jiahao Wang , Xianglong Zhang , Xiuzhen Cheng , Pengfei Hu , Guoming Zhang

Natural language processing (NLP) has received unprecedented attention. While advancements in NLP models have led to extensive research into their backdoor vulnerabilities, the potential for these advancements to introduce new backdoor…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Ka-Ho Chow , Wenqi Wei , Lei Yu

With the burgeoning advancements in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the demand for training data has increased significantly. To save costs, it has become common for users and businesses to outsource the labor-intensive task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Ziqiang Li , Yueqi Zeng , Pengfei Xia , Lei Liu , Zhangjie Fu , Bin Li

The implications of backdoor attacks on English-centric large language models (LLMs) have been widely examined - such attacks can be achieved by embedding malicious behaviors during training and activated under specific conditions that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Xuanli He , Jun Wang , Qiongkai Xu , Pasquale Minervini , Pontus Stenetorp , Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein , Trevor Cohn