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Recent studies show that neural natural language processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Injected with backdoors, models perform normally on benign examples but produce attacker-specified predictions when the backdoor is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Fanchao Qi , Yuan Yao , Sophia Xu , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Multimodal contrastive learning models like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable vision-language alignment capabilities, yet their vulnerability to backdoor attacks poses critical security risks. Attackers can implant latent triggers that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Mengyuan Sun , Yu Li , Yuchen Liu , Bo Du , Yunjie Ge

Backdoor attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically couple a secret trigger to an explicit malicious output. We show that this explicit association is unnecessary for common LLMs. We introduce a compliance-only backdoor: supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Yuting Tan , Yi Huang , Zhuo Li

Prompt learning has emerged as an efficient alternative for fine-tuning foundational models, such as CLIP, for various downstream tasks. However, there is no work that provides a comprehensive explanation for the working mechanism of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Shuailei Ma , Chen-Wei Xie , Ying Wei , Siyang Sun , Jiaqi Fan , Xiaoyi Bao , Yuxin Guo , Yun Zheng

Foundational image-language models have generated considerable interest due to their efficient adaptation to downstream tasks by prompt learning. Prompt learning treats part of the language model input as trainable while freezing the rest,…

Prompt-Tuning is an efficient method for adapting pre-trained language models to new tasks with minimal computational overhead by modifying prompt embeddings. In this work, we investigate how crucial the phenomenon of embedding collapse,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Sergey Sedov , Sumanth Bharadwaj Hachalli Karanam , Venu Gopal Kadamba

Here, we show that current LLM unlearning methods inherently reduce models' robustness, causing them to misbehave even when a single non-adversarial forget-token is present in the retain-query. Toward understanding underlying causes, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Dang Huu-Tien , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Anh Bui , Minh-Phuong Nguyen , Le-Minh Nguyen , Naoya Inoue

Recent studies have revealed a security threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, called the Backdoor Attack. Victim models can maintain competitive performance on clean samples while behaving abnormally on samples with a specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Wenkai Yang , Lei Li , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Xu Sun , Bin He

Prompting is one of the main ways to adapt a pretrained model to target tasks. Besides manually constructing prompts, many prompt optimization methods have been proposed in the literature. Method development is mainly empirically driven,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Tim Genewein , Li Kevin Wenliang , Jordi Grau-Moya , Anian Ruoss , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter

It has been demonstrated that the art of prompt tuning is highly effective in efficiently extracting knowledge from pretrained foundation models, encompassing pretrained language models (PLMs), vision pretrained models, and vision-language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Xianjun Yang , Wei Cheng , Xujiang Zhao , Wenchao Yu , Linda Petzold , Haifeng Chen

While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk is emerging: capability-oriented training induced exploitation. We investigate whether language models, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yujun Zhou , Yue Huang , Han Bao , Kehan Guo , Zhenwen Liang , Pin-Yu Chen , Tian Gao , Werner Geyer , Nuno Moniz , Nitesh V Chawla , Xiangliang Zhang

Large language models are increasingly used for vulnerability detection, yet their reliability under different prompt formulations remains uncharacterized. We present PromptAudit, a controlled evaluation framework that isolates prompt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Steffen J. Camarato , Yahya Hmaiti , Mandana Ghadamian , David Mohaisen

Prompt-tuning has emerged as an attractive paradigm for deploying large-scale language models due to its strong downstream task performance and efficient multitask serving ability. Despite its wide adoption, we empirically show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Chengkun Wei , Wenlong Meng , Zhikun Zhang , Min Chen , Minghu Zhao , Wenjing Fang , Lei Wang , Zihui Zhang , Wenzhi Chen

The rise of pre-trained unified foundation models breaks down the barriers between different modalities and tasks, providing comprehensive support to users with unified architectures. However, the backdoor attack on pre-trained models poses…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Zenghui Yuan , Yixin Liu , Kai Zhang , Pan Zhou , Lichao Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly through instruction tuning, which enables broad task generalization without additional fine-tuning. However, their reliance on large-scale…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 San Kim , Gary Geunbae Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into the scientific peer-review process, raising new questions about their reliability and resilience to manipulation. In this work, we investigate the potential for hidden…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Matteo Gioele Collu , Umberto Salviati , Roberto Confalonieri , Mauro Conti , Giovanni Apruzzese

Prompt learning represents a promising method for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks by learning a set of text embeddings. One challenge inherent to these methods is the poor generalization…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Fangming Cui , Xun Yang , Chao Wu , Liang Xiao , Xinmei Tian

With the advancement of technology, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, powering LLM-integrated applications like Microsoft Copilot. However, as LLMs…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Yulin Chen , Haoran Li , Zihao Zheng , Yangqiu Song , Dekai Wu , Bryan Hooi

Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition frozen Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. While prompt tuning has gradually reached the performance level of fine-tuning as the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Fang Ma , Chen Zhang , Lei Ren , Jingang Wang , Qifan Wang , Wei Wu , Xiaojun Quan , Dawei Song

AI systems are rapidly advancing in capability, and frontier model developers broadly acknowledge the need for safeguards against serious misuse. However, this paper demonstrates that fine-tuning, whether via open weights or closed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Brendan Murphy , Dillon Bowen , Shahrad Mohammadzadeh , Tom Tseng , Julius Broomfield , Adam Gleave , Kellin Pelrine