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Related papers: Unveiling Vulnerability of Self-Attention

200 papers

Self-attention mechanisms, especially multi-head self-attention (MSA), have achieved great success in many fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, many existing vision transformer (ViT) works simply inherent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-17 Leijie Wu , Song Guo , Yaohong Ding , Junxiao Wang , Wenchao Xu , Richard Yida Xu , Jie Zhang

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown immense potential in enhancing various aspects of our daily lives, from conversational AI to search and AI assistants. However, their growing capabilities come at the cost of extremely large model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Yingyu Liang , Jiangxuan Long , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yufa Zhou

As powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) are now widely used for numerous practical applications, their safety is of critical importance. While alignment techniques have significantly improved overall safety, LLMs remain vulnerable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Samuel Jacob Chacko , Sajib Biswas , Chashi Mahiul Islam , Fatema Tabassum Liza , Xiuwen Liu

This study investigates embedding reconstruction attacks in large language models (LLMs) applied to genomic sequences, with a specific focus on how fine-tuning affects vulnerability to these attacks. Building upon Pan et al.'s seminal work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Reem Al-Saidi , Erman Ayday , Ziad Kobti

The recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) when exposed to malicious inputs. While various defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these threats, there has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Tianlong Li , Zhenghua Wang , Wenhao Liu , Muling Wu , Shihan Dou , Changze Lv , Xiaohua Wang , Xiaoqing Zheng , Xuanjing Huang

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are prolonged, stealthy intrusions by skilled adversaries that compromise high-value systems to steal data or disrupt operations. Reconstructing complete attack chains from massive, heterogeneous logs is…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rujie Dai , Peizhuo Lv , Yujiang Gui , Qiujian Lv , Yuanyuan Qiao , Yan Wang , Degang Sun , Weiqing Huang , Yingjiu Li , XiaoFeng Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and complex planning. Simultaneously, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have garnered attention for their potential to enable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Can Zheng , Yuhan Cao , Xiaoning Dong , Tianxing He

Catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge when fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrow, task-specific data, often degrading their general knowledge and reasoning abilities. We propose SA-SFT, a lightweight…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Yutao Sun , Mingshuai Chen , Tiancheng Zhao , Phillip Miao , Zilun Zhang , Haozhan Shen , Ruizhe Zhu , Jianwei Yin

As the AI systems become deeply embedded in social media platforms, we've uncovered a concerning security vulnerability that goes beyond traditional adversarial attacks. It becomes important to assess the risks of LLMs before the general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Nilanjana Das , Edward Raff , Aman Chadha , Manas Gaur

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Michel Fabrice Serret

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results on natural language tasks, and security researchers are beginning to employ them in both offensive and defensive systems. In cyber-security, there have been multiple research…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Jiacen Xu , Jack W. Stokes , Geoff McDonald , Xuesong Bai , David Marshall , Siyue Wang , Adith Swaminathan , Zhou Li

The safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is vulnerable to both manual and automated jailbreak attacks, which adversarially trigger LLMs to output harmful content. However, current methods for jailbreaking LLMs, which nest entire…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Xirui Li , Ruochen Wang , Minhao Cheng , Tianyi Zhou , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be misused to spread unwanted content at scale. Content watermarking deters misuse by hiding messages in content, enabling its detection using a secret watermarking key. Robustness is a core security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Abdulrahman Diaa , Toluwani Aremu , Nils Lukas

This paper investigates the real-world vulnerabilities of audio-based large language models (ALLMs), such as Qwen2-Audio. We first demonstrate that an adversary can craft stealthy audio perturbations to manipulate ALLMs into exhibiting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Vinu Sankar Sadasivan , Soheil Feizi , Rajiv Mathews , Lun Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to multi-turn jailbreak attacks. We introduce HarmNet, a modular framework comprising ThoughtNet, a hierarchical semantic network; a feedback-driven Simulator for iterative query refinement;…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sidhant Narula , Javad Rafiei Asl , Mohammad Ghasemigol , Eduardo Blanco , Daniel Takabi

Textual backdoor attacks present a substantial security risk to Large Language Models (LLM). It embeds carefully chosen triggers into a victim model at the training stage, and makes the model erroneously predict inputs containing the same…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Xinglin Li , Xianwen He , Yao Li , Minhao Cheng

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate increasing capabilities across real-world applications such as code generation and chatbot assistance, ensuring their safety has become paramount. Unlike traditional Large Language Models (LLMs),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Peiyuan Tang , Haojie Xin , Xiaodong Zhang , Jun Sun , Qin Xia , Zijiang Yang