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The rapid growth of natural language processing (NLP) and pre-trained language models have enabled accurate text classification in a variety of settings. However, text classification models are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-30 A. Dilara Yavuz , M. Emre Gursoy

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the security of large language models (LLMs), causing them to exhibit anomalous behavior under specific trigger conditions. The design of backdoor triggers has evolved from fixed triggers to dynamic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Haotian Jin , Yang Li , Haihui Fan , Lin Shen , Xiangfang Li , Bo Li

Natural language processing (NLP) systems have been proven to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, whereby hidden features (backdoors) are trained into a language model and may only be activated by specific inputs (called triggers), to trick…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Shaofeng Li , Hui Liu , Tian Dong , Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao , Minhui Xue , Haojin Zhu , Jialiang Lu

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the secure deployment of large language models (LLMs), enabling adversaries to implant hidden behaviors triggered by specific inputs. However, existing methods often rely on manually crafted…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Yige Li , Zhe Li , Wei Zhao , Nay Myat Min , Hanxun Huang , Xingjun Ma , Jun Sun

Pre-trained language models allowed us to process downstream tasks with the help of fine-tuning, which aids the model to achieve fairly high accuracy in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Such easily-downloaded language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Jaechul Roh , Minhao Cheng , Yajun Fang

The surge of state-of-the-art Transformer-based models has undoubtedly pushed the limits of NLP model performance, excelling in a variety of tasks. We cast the spotlight on the underexplored task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), since…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Alexandros Koulakos , Maria Lymperaiou , Giorgos Filandrianos , Giorgos Stamou

With the development of technology, large language models (LLMs) have dominated the downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, because of the LLMs' instruction-following abilities and inability to distinguish the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yulin Chen , Haoran Li , Yuan Sui , Yangqiu Song , Bryan Hooi

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

Backdoor attack is a severe threat to the trustworthiness of DNN-based language models. In this paper, we first extend the definition of memorization of language models from sample-wise to more fine-grained sentence element-wise (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zhenting Wang , Zhizhi Wang , Mingyu Jin , Mengnan Du , Juan Zhai , Shiqing Ma

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 are known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, which poses a newly arisen threat to NLP models. Prior online backdoor defense methods for NLP models only focus on the anomalies at either the input…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Sishuo Chen , Wenkai Yang , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xiaohan Bi , Xu Sun

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

The prompt-based learning paradigm, which bridges the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot settings. Despite being widely applied, prompt-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Shuai Zhao , Jinming Wen , Luu Anh Tuan , Junbo Zhao , Jie Fu

Prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks against prompt-based models consider injecting backdoors into the entire embedding layers or word embedding vectors. Such attacks can be easily affected by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Kai Mei , Zheng Li , Zhenting Wang , Yang Zhang , Shiqing Ma

Large language models (LLMs) have seen significant advancements, achieving superior performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where models behave normally for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Chen Chen , Yuchen Sun , Jiaxin Gao , Xueluan Gong , Qian Wang , Ziyao Wang , Yongsen Zheng , Kwok-Yan Lam

Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent training-time threat to deep neural networks (DNNs). They can manipulate the output of DNNs and possess high insidiousness. In the field of natural language processing, some attack methods have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Fanchao Qi , Yangyi Chen , Mukai Li , Yuan Yao , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

The democratization of pre-trained language models through open-source initiatives has rapidly advanced innovation and expanded access to cutting-edge technologies. However, this openness also brings significant security risks, including…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Ansh Arora , Xuanli He , Maximilian Mozes , Srinibas Swain , Mark Dras , Qiongkai Xu

Modern language models remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks via poisoned data, where training inputs containing a trigger are paired with a target output, causing the model to reproduce that behavior whenever the trigger appears at…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Eric Xue , Ruiyi Zhang , Pengtao Xie

Machine Learning (ML) has automated a multitude of our day-to-day decision making domains such as education, employment and driving automation. The continued success of ML largely depends on our ability to trust the model we are using.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Sakshi Udeshi , Shanshan Peng , Gerald Woo , Lionell Loh , Louth Rawshan , Sudipta Chattopadhyay

Backdoor attacks compromise model reliability by using triggers to manipulate outputs. Trigger inversion can accurately locate these triggers via a generator and is therefore critical for backdoor defense. However, the discrete nature of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Ruyi Zhang , Heng Gao , Songlei Jian , Yusong Tan , Haifang Zhou