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Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to the integrity and reliability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, enabling adversaries to manipulate model behavior by injecting poisoned data with hidden triggers. These attacks can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Osama Wehbi , Sarhad Arisdakessian , Omar Abdel Wahab , Azzam Mourad , Hadi Otrok , Jamal Bentahar

Practitioners commonly download pretrained machine learning models from open repositories and finetune them to fit specific applications. We show that this practice introduces a new risk of privacy backdoors. By tampering with a pretrained…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Shanglun Feng , Florian Tramèr

As collaborative learning allows joint training of a model using multiple sources of data, the security problem has been a central concern. Malicious users can upload poisoned data to prevent the model's convergence or inject hidden…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-01-21 Ximing Qiao , Yuhua Bai , Siping Hu , Ang Li , Yiran Chen , Hai Li

Recent researches have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to a security threat known as Backdoor Attack. The backdoored model will behave well in normal cases but exhibit malicious behaviours on inputs inserted with a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Yunzhuo Hao , Wenkai Yang , Yankai Lin

Backdoor attacks, in which a model behaves maliciously when given an attacker-specified trigger, pose a major security risk for practitioners who depend on publicly released language models. As a countermeasure, backdoor detection methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Jun Yan , Wenjie Jacky Mo , Xiang Ren , Robin Jia

The widespread adoption of deep learning across various industries has introduced substantial challenges, particularly in terms of model explainability and security. The inherent complexity of deep learning models, while contributing to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Kealan Dunnett , Reza Arablouei , Dimity Miller , Volkan Dedeoglu , Raja Jurdak

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Guangyu Shen , Siyuan Cheng , Xiangzhe Xu , Yuan Zhou , Hanxi Guo , Zhuo Zhang , Xiangyu Zhang

Model merging is a technique that combines multiple finetuned models into a single model without additional training, allowing a free-rider to cheaply inherit specialized capabilities. This study investigates methodologies to suppress…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wei Junhao , Yu Zhe , Sakuma Jun

Generative large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks, yet they remain susceptible to backdoor attacks: carefully crafted triggers in the input can manipulate the model to produce…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yige Li , Hanxun Huang , Yunhan Zhao , Xingjun Ma , Jun Sun

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

Speech Language Models (SLMs) enable natural interactions via spoken instructions, which more effectively capture user intent by detecting nuances in speech. The richer speech signal introduces new security risks compared to text-based…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-17 Amirbek Djanibekov , Nurdaulet Mukhituly , Kentaro Inui , Hanan Aldarmaki , Nils Lukas

Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving machine learning framework, faces significant data-related challenges. For example, the lack of suitable public datasets leads to ineffective information exchange, especially in heterogeneous…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Xi Li , Chen Wu , Jiaqi Wang

In a federated learning (FL) system, malicious participants can easily embed backdoors into the aggregated model while maintaining the model's performance on the main task. To this end, various defenses, including training stage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Henger Li , Chen Wu , Sencun Zhu , Zizhan Zheng

Federated Learning (FL) is a popular distributed machine learning paradigm that enables jointly training a global model without sharing clients' data. However, its repetitive server-client communication gives room for backdoor attacks with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-20 Pei Fang , Jinghui Chen

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

The rapid proliferation of open-source language models significantly increases the risks of downstream backdoor attacks. These backdoors can introduce dangerous behaviours during model deployment and can evade detection by conventional…

In recent years, the rise of machine learning (ML) in cybersecurity has brought new challenges, including the increasing threat of backdoor poisoning attacks on ML malware classifiers. For instance, adversaries could inject malicious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Dung Thuy Nguyen , Ngoc N. Tran , Taylor T. Johnson , Kevin Leach

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where inducing a bias toward a certain topic can have significant consequences, and backdoor attacks can be used to produce such models. Prior work on backdoor attacks has…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anudeep Das , Prach Chantasantitam , Gurjot Singh , Lipeng He , Mariia Ponomarenko , Florian Kerschbaum

Institutions with limited data and computing resources often outsource model training to third-party providers in a semi-honest setting, assuming adherence to prescribed training protocols with pre-defined learning paradigm (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Xuan Wang , Siyuan Liang , Dongping Liao , Han Fang , Aishan Liu , Xiaochun Cao , Yu-liang Lu , Ee-Chien Chang , Xitong Gao