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Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized software development practices, yet concerns about their safety have arisen, particularly regarding hidden backdoors, aka trojans. Backdoor attacks involve the insertion of triggers into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aftab Hussain , Md Rafiqul Islam Rabin , Mohammad Amin Alipour

Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zedian Shao , Charles Fleming , Teodora Baluta

Instruction fine-tuning attacks pose a serious threat to large language models (LLMs) by subtly embedding poisoned examples in fine-tuning datasets, leading to harmful or unintended behaviors in downstream applications. Detecting such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jiawei Li

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized software development practices, yet concerns about their safety have arisen, particularly regarding hidden backdoors, aka trojans. Backdoor attacks involve the insertion of triggers into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Aftab Hussain , Md Rafiqul Islam Rabin , Navid Ayoobi , Mohammad Amin Alipour

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

Recent research on large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to understand and employ deceptive behavior, even without explicit prompting. However, such behavior has only been observed in rare, specialized cases and has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Laurène Vaugrante , Francesca Carlon , Maluna Menke , Thilo Hagendorff

Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, where malicious training examples embed hidden behaviours triggered by specific input patterns. However, most existing works assume a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Sanhanat Sivapiromrat , Caiqi Zhang , Marco Basaldella , Nigel Collier

Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread adoption across diverse applications due to their impressive generative capabilities. Their plug-and-play nature enables both developers and end users to interact with these models through…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Zongze Li , Jiawei Guo , Haipeng Cai

We describe a vulnerability in language models (LMs) trained with user feedback, whereby a single user can persistently alter LM knowledge and behavior given only the ability to provide prompts and upvote / downvote feedback on LM outputs.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Almog Hilel , Riddhi Bhagwat , Idan Shenfeld , Jacob Andreas , Leshem Choshen

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

As large language models (LLMs) have been deployed in various real-world settings, concerns about the harm they may propagate have grown. Various jailbreaking techniques have been developed to expose the vulnerabilities of these models and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yubin Ge , Neeraja Kirtane , Hao Peng , Dilek Hakkani-Tür

As the number of large language models (LLMs) released to the public grows, there is a pressing need to understand the safety implications associated with these models learning from third-party custom finetuning data. We explore the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jiachen Zhao , Zhun Deng , David Madras , James Zou , Mengye Ren

While a large body of literature suggests that large language models (LLMs) acquire rich linguistic representations, little is known about whether they adapt to linguistic biases in a human-like way. The present study probes this question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Suet-Ying Lam , Qingcheng Zeng , Kexun Zhang , Chenyu You , Rob Voigt

This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Jason Wei , Maarten Bosma , Vincent Y. Zhao , Kelvin Guu , Adams Wei Yu , Brian Lester , Nan Du , Andrew M. Dai , Quoc V. Le

Large language models (LLMs) have gained human trust due to their capabilities and helpfulness. However, this in turn may allow LLMs to affect users' mindsets by manipulating language. It is termed as gaslighting, a psychological effect. In…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Wei Li , Luyao Zhu , Yang Song , Ruixi Lin , Rui Mao , Yang You

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

In the domain of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has been recognized for its innovative ability to adapt to new tasks, relying on examples rather than retraining or fine-tuning. This paper delves into the critical…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Pengfei He , Han Xu , Yue Xing , Hui Liu , Makoto Yamada , Jiliang Tang

Fine-tuning large language models on private data for downstream applications poses significant privacy risks in potentially exposing sensitive information. Several popular community platforms now offer convenient distribution of a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Md Rafi Ur Rashid , Jing Liu , Toshiaki Koike-Akino , Shagufta Mehnaz , Ye Wang

The lifecycle of large language models (LLMs) is far more complex than that of traditional machine learning models, involving multiple training stages, diverse data sources, and varied inference methods. While prior research on data…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Pengfei He , Yue Xing , Han Xu , Zhen Xiang , Jiliang Tang

Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these…