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Backdoor attacks are a significant threat to large language models (LLMs), often embedded via public checkpoints, yet existing defenses rely on impractical assumptions about trigger settings. To address this challenge, we propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Liang Lin , Miao Yu , Moayad Aloqaily , Zhenhong Zhou , Kun Wang , Linsey Pang , Prakhar Mehrotra , Qingsong Wen

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable versatility and adaptability, while their widespread adoption across various applications also raises critical safety concerns. This paper focuses on the impact of backdoored LLMs.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jiyang Qiu , Xinbei Ma , Zhuosheng Zhang , Hai Zhao , Yun Li , Qianren Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where triggers embedded in poisoned samples can maliciously alter LLMs' behaviors. In this paper, we move beyond attacking LLMs and instead examine backdoor…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Huaizhi Ge , Yiming Li , Qifan Wang , Yongfeng Zhang , Ruixiang Tang

Pre-trained Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can be easily adapted to a variety of downstream language tasks. This significantly accelerates the development of language models. However, NLP models have been shown to be vulnerable to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Kangjie Chen , Yuxian Meng , Xiaofei Sun , Shangwei Guo , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li , Chun Fan

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance compared to previous methods on various tasks, and often serve as the foundation models for many researches and services. However, the untrustworthy third-party LLMs may…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Hai Huang , Zhengyu Zhao , Michael Backes , Yun Shen , Yang Zhang

In a backdoor attack on a machine learning model, an adversary produces a model that performs well on normal inputs but outputs targeted misclassifications on inputs containing a small trigger pattern. Model compression is a widely-used…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Yulong Tian , Fnu Suya , Fengyuan Xu , David Evans

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by advancing natural language understanding and generation, enabling applications across fields beyond healthcare, software engineering, and conversational systems.…

Multimodal Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to their autoregressive counterparts. Yet their vulnerability to backdoor attacks remains largely unexplored. In this work, we show that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Guangnian Wan , Qi Li , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Xinchao Wang

As ML models become increasingly complex and integral to high-stakes domains such as finance and healthcare, they also become more susceptible to sophisticated adversarial attacks. We investigate the threat posed by undetectable backdoors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Alkis Kalavasis , Amin Karbasi , Argyris Oikonomou , Katerina Sotiraki , Grigoris Velegkas , Manolis Zampetakis

Large-scale language models have achieved tremendous success across various natural language processing (NLP) applications. Nevertheless, language models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, which inject stealthy triggers into models for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Yujin Huang , Terry Yue Zhuo , Qiongkai Xu , Han Hu , Xingliang Yuan , Chunyang Chen

Recent studies have pointed out that natural language processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. A backdoored model produces normal outputs on the clean samples while performing improperly on the texts with triggers that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Xuan Sheng , Zhicheng Li , Zhaoyang Han , Xiangmao Chang , Piji Li

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

Neural networks are widely known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, a method that poisons a portion of the training data to make the target model perform well on normal data sets, while outputting attacker-specified or random categories…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yong Li , Han Gao

Existing studies in backdoor defense have predominantly focused on the training phase, overlooking the critical aspect of testing time defense. This gap becomes pronounced in the context of LLMs deployed as Web Services, which typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Wenjie Mo , Jiashu Xu , Qin Liu , Jiongxiao Wang , Jun Yan , Hadi Askari , Chaowei Xiao , Muhao Chen

Diffusion models (DMs) are regarded as one of the most advanced generative models today, yet recent studies suggest that they are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, which establish hidden associations between particular input patterns and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Jiang Hao , Xiao Jin , Hu Xiaoguang , Chen Tianyou , Zhao Jiajia

Recent studies have shown that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a designed trigger is injected into the dataset, causing erroneous predictions when activated. In this paper, we propose a novel defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Wenjie Huo , Katinka Wolter

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

Model merging has emerged as a promising approach for updating large language models (LLMs) by integrating multiple domain-specific models into a cross-domain merged model. Despite its utility and plug-and-play nature, unmonitored mergers…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Lin Lu , Zhigang Zuo , Ziji Sheng , Pan Zhou

Large pre-trained models have achieved notable success across a range of downstream tasks. However, recent research shows that a type of adversarial attack ($\textit{i.e.,}$ backdoor attack) can manipulate the behavior of machine learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Dongliang Guo , Mengxuan Hu , Zihan Guan , Junfeng Guo , Thomas Hartvigsen , Sheng Li

Federated learning (FL) represents a novel paradigm to machine learning, addressing critical issues related to data privacy and security, yet suffering from data insufficiency and imbalance. The emergence of foundation models (FMs) provides…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Xi Li , Songhe Wang , Chen Wu , Hao Zhou , Jiaqi Wang