English
Related papers

Related papers: Sleeper Agent: Scalable Hidden Trigger Backdoors f…

200 papers

Detecting whether a model has been poisoned is a longstanding problem in AI security. In this work, we present a practical scanner for identifying sleeper agent-style backdoors in causal language models. Our approach relies on two key…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Blake Bullwinkel , Giorgio Severi , Keegan Hines , Amanda Minnich , Ram Shankar Siva Kumar , Yonatan Zunger

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown great promise in various domains. However, vulnerabilities associated with DNN training, such as backdoor attacks, are a significant concern. These attacks involve the subtle insertion of triggers…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Bart Pleiter , Behrad Tajalli , Stefanos Koffas , Gorka Abad , Jing Xu , Martha Larson , Stjepan Picek

This paper investigates the threat of backdoors in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent policies and proposes a novel method for their detection at runtime. Our study focuses on elusive in-distribution backdoor triggers. Such triggers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Sanyam Vyas , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Outsourced deep neural networks have been demonstrated to suffer from patch-based trojan attacks, in which an adversary poisons the training sets to inject a backdoor in the obtained model so that regular inputs can be still labeled…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Ying He , Zhili Shen , Chang Xia , Jingyu Hua , Wei Tong , Sheng Zhong

Backdoor attack intends to inject hidden backdoor into the deep neural networks (DNNs), such that the prediction of infected models will be maliciously changed if the hidden backdoor is activated by the attacker-defined trigger. Currently,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Yiming Li , Tongqing Zhai , Yong Jiang , Zhifeng Li , Shu-Tao Xia

Backdoors and adversarial examples are the two primary threats currently faced by deep neural networks (DNNs). Both attacks attempt to hijack the model behaviors with unintended outputs by introducing (small) perturbations to the inputs.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Yunjie Ge , Qian Wang , Huayang Huang , Qi Li , Cong Wang , Chao Shen , Lingchen Zhao , Peipei Jiang , Zheng Fang , Shenyi Zhang

Skill-based agent systems tackle complex tasks by composing reusable skills, improving modularity and scalability while introducing a largely unexamined security attack surface. We propose SkillTrojan, a backdoor attack that targets skill…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yunhao Feng , Yifan Ding , Yingshui Tan , Boren Zheng , Yanming Guo , Xiaolong Li , Kun Zhai , Yishan Li , Wenke Huang

We present a novel methodology for neural network backdoor attacks. Unlike existing training-time attacks where the Trojaned network would respond to the Trojan trigger after training, our approach inserts a Trojan that will remain dormant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Feisi Fu , Panagiota Kiourti , Wenchao Li

Recently, it has been shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to Trojan attacks, where an attacker can install a backdoor during training time to make the resultant model misidentify samples contaminated with a small trigger patch.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Haripriya Harikumar , Vuong Le , Santu Rana , Sourangshu Bhattacharya , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

Backdoor attacks become a significant security concern for deep neural networks in recent years. An image classification model can be compromised if malicious backdoors are injected into it. This corruption will cause the model to function…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Hongwei Zhang , Xiaoyin Xu , Dongsheng An , Xianfeng Gu , Min Zhang

Backdoor attack intends to embed hidden backdoor into deep neural networks (DNNs), so that the attacked models perform well on benign samples, whereas their predictions will be maliciously changed if the hidden backdoor is activated by…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Yiming Li , Yong Jiang , Zhifeng Li , Shu-Tao Xia

Backdoor attacks compromise the integrity and reliability of machine learning models by embedding a hidden trigger during the training process, which can later be activated to cause unintended misbehavior. We propose a novel backdoor…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Felix Hsieh , Huy H. Nguyen , AprilPyone MaungMaung , Dmitrii Usynin , Isao Echizen

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, a type of adversarial attack that poisons the training data to manipulate the behavior of models trained on such data. Clean-label attacks are a more stealthy form of backdoor attacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Quang H. Nguyen , Nguyen Ngoc-Hieu , The-Anh Ta , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Kok-Seng Wong , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Khoa D. Doan

Backdoor attacks pose a new threat to NLP models. A standard strategy to construct poisoned data in backdoor attacks is to insert triggers (e.g., rare words) into selected sentences and alter the original label to a target label. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-28 Leilei Gan , Jiwei Li , Tianwei Zhang , Xiaoya Li , Yuxian Meng , Fei Wu , Yi Yang , Shangwei Guo , Chun Fan

Backdoor attacks are rapidly emerging threats to deep neural networks (DNNs). In the backdoor attack scenario, attackers usually implant the backdoor into the target model by manipulating the training dataset or training process. Then, the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Nan Zhong , Zhenxing Qian , Xinpeng Zhang

Backdoor attacks are a kind of insidious security threat against machine learning models. After being injected with a backdoor in training, the victim model will produce adversary-specified outputs on the inputs embedded with predesigned…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Fanchao Qi , Mukai Li , Yangyi Chen , Zhengyan Zhang , Zhiyuan Liu , Yasheng Wang , Maosong Sun

Together with impressive advances touching every aspect of our society, AI technology based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) is bringing increasing security concerns. While attacks operating at test time have monopolised the initial attention…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Wei Guo , Benedetta Tondi , Mauro Barni

Backdoor attacks pose a serious security threat for training neural networks as they surreptitiously introduce hidden functionalities into a model. Such backdoors remain silent during inference on clean inputs, evading detection due to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Lukas Struppek , Martin B. Hentschel , Clifton Poth , Dominik Hintersdorf , Kristian Kersting

Backdoor attacks represent a subtle yet effective class of cyberattacks targeting AI models, primarily due to their stealthy nature. The model behaves normally on clean data but exhibits malicious behavior only when the attacker embeds a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Sujeevan Aseervatham , Achraf Kerzazi , Younès Bennani

The vulnerabilities to backdoor attacks have recently threatened the trustworthiness of machine learning models in practical applications. Conventional wisdom suggests that not everyone can be an attacker since the process of designing the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Sze Jue Yang , Quang Nguyen , Chee Seng Chan , Khoa D. Doan