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In recent trends, one can observe Large Language Models (LLMs) are exposed to backdoor attacks where vicious triggers added during training or model editing to elicit harmful outputs on specific input patterns while maintaining clean…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jagadeesh Rachapudi , Ritali Vatsi , Pranav Singh , Praful Hambarde , Amit Shukla

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

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

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

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked significant achievements in language processing and reasoning capabilities. Despite their advancements, LLMs face vulnerabilities to data poisoning attacks, where the adversary inserts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Xiangyu Zhou , Yao Qiang , Saleh Zare Zade , Mohammad Amin Roshani , Prashant Khanduri , Douglas Zytko , Dongxiao Zhu

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

Recent research highlights concerns about the trustworthiness of third-party Pre-Trained Language Models (PTLMs) due to potential backdoor attacks. These backdoored PTLMs, however, are effective only for specific pre-defined downstream…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Rui Zhang , Yun Shen , Hongwei Li , Wenbo Jiang , Hanxiao Chen , Yuan Zhang , Guowen Xu , Yang Zhang

Machine learning is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. Previous literature has demonstrated that at the training stage attackers can manipulate data and data sampling procedures to control model behaviour. A common attack goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Mikel Bober-Irizar , Ilia Shumailov , Yiren Zhao , Robert Mullins , Nicolas Papernot

Existing research on training-time attacks for deep neural networks (DNNs), such as backdoors, largely assume that models are static once trained, and hidden backdoors trained into models remain active indefinitely. In practice, models are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Huiying Li , Arjun Nitin Bhagoji , Yuxin Chen , Haitao Zheng , Ben Y. Zhao

This paper investigates the threat of backdoors in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent policies and proposes a novel method for their detection at runtime. Our study focuses on elusive in-distribution backdoor triggers. Such triggers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Sanyam Vyas , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is an emerging paradigm that significantly boosts a Large Language Model's (LLM's) reasoning abilities on complex logical tasks, such as mathematics and programming. However, we…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Weiyang Guo , Zesheng Shi , Zeen Zhu , Yuan Zhou , Min Zhang , Jing Li

Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks through data poisoning, yet the internal mechanisms governing these attacks remain a black box. Previous research on interpretability for LLM safety tends to focus…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Miao Yu , Zhenhong Zhou , Moayad Aloqaily , Kun Wang , Biwei Huang , Stephen Wang , Yueming Jin , Qingsong Wen

Recent work has demonstrated robust mechanisms by which attacks can be orchestrated on machine learning models. In contrast to adversarial examples, backdoor or trojan attacks embed surgically modified samples with targeted labels in the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Zhaoyuan Yang , Naresh Iyer , Johan Reimann , Nurali Virani

Machine learning models are increasingly present in our everyday lives; as a result, they become targets of adversarial attackers seeking to manipulate the systems we interact with. A well-known vulnerability is a backdoor introduced into a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Enrico Ahlers , Daniel Passon , Yannic Noller , Lars Grunske

Backdoor attacks mislead machine-learning models to output an attacker-specified class when presented a specific trigger at test time. These attacks require poisoning the training data to compromise the learning algorithm, e.g., by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Kathrin Grosse , Taesung Lee , Battista Biggio , Youngja Park , Michael Backes , Ian Molloy

Backdoor attack intends to embed hidden backdoor into deep neural networks (DNNs), so that the attacked models perform well on benign samples, whereas their predictions will be maliciously changed if the hidden backdoor is activated by…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Yiming Li , Yong Jiang , Zhifeng Li , Shu-Tao Xia

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely integrated into interactive systems such as dialogue agents and task-oriented assistants. This growing ecosystem also raises supply-chain risks, where adversaries can distribute poisoned models that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yiyang Lu , Jinwen He , Yue Zhao , Kai Chen , Ruigang Liang , Cheng Hong , Yingjun Zhang

LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one experiment, we finetune…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Jan Betley , Jorio Cocola , Dylan Feng , James Chua , Andy Arditi , Anna Sztyber-Betley , Owain Evans

Deep neural networks have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Specifically, by injecting a small number of maliciously constructed inputs into the training set, an adversary is able to plant a backdoor into the trained…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-10 Alexander Turner , Dimitris Tsipras , Aleksander Madry

While machine learning (ML) models are being increasingly trusted to make decisions in different and varying areas, the safety of systems using such models has become an increasing concern. In particular, ML models are often trained on data…