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Defenses against security threats have been an interest of recent studies. Recent works have shown that it is not difficult to attack a natural language processing (NLP) model while defending against them is still a cat-mouse game. Backdoor…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Sangeet Sagar , Abhinav Bhatt , Abhijith Srinivas Bidaralli

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

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

Speech language models (SLMs) are systems of systems: independent components that unite to achieve a common goal. Despite their heterogeneous nature, SLMs are often studied end-to-end; how information flows through the pipeline remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Alexandrine Fortier , Thomas Thebaud , Jesús Villalba , Najim Dehak , Patrick Cardinal , Peter West

We explore \textbf{C}ross-lingual \textbf{B}ackdoor \textbf{AT}tacks (X-BAT) in multilingual Large Language Models (mLLMs), revealing how backdoors inserted in one language can automatically transfer to others through shared embedding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Himanshu Beniwal , Sailesh Panda , Birudugadda Srivibhav , Mayank Singh

Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, particularly when fine-tuned on large, domain-relevant datasets. However, they remain vulnerable to backdoor…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Anindya Sundar Das , Kangjie Chen , Monowar Bhuyan

Large language models are aligned to be safe, preventing users from generating harmful content like misinformation or instructions for illegal activities. However, previous work has shown that the alignment process is vulnerable to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Javier Rando , Francesco Croce , Kryštof Mitka , Stepan Shabalin , Maksym Andriushchenko , Nicolas Flammarion , Florian Tramèr

Backdoor attacks pose a new threat to NLP models. A standard strategy to construct poisoned data in backdoor attacks is to insert triggers (e.g., rare words) into selected sentences and alter the original label to a target label. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-28 Leilei Gan , Jiwei Li , Tianwei Zhang , Xiaoya Li , Yuxian Meng , Fei Wu , Yi Yang , Shangwei Guo , Chun Fan

Backdoor vulnerabilities widely exist in the fine-tuning of large language models(LLMs). Most backdoor poisoning methods operate mainly at the token level and lack deeper semantic manipulation, which limits stealthiness. In addition, Prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ziyu Liu , Tao Li , Tianjie Ni , Xiaolong Lan , Wengang Ma , Tao Yang , Guohua Wang , Junjiang He

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.…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Haiyan Zhao , Hanjie Chen , Fan Yang , Ninghao Liu , Huiqi Deng , Hengyi Cai , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Mengnan Du

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized content creation across digital platforms, offering unprecedented capabilities in natural language generation and understanding. These models enable beneficial applications such as content…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Chi Zhang , Changjia Zhu , Junjie Xiong , Xiaoran Xu , Lingyao Li , Yao Liu , Zhuo Lu

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

In this paper, we present a new form of backdoor attack against Large Language Models (LLMs): lingual-backdoor attacks. The key novelty of lingual-backdoor attacks is that the language itself serves as the trigger to hijack the infected…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Zihan Wang , Hongwei Li , Rui Zhang , Wenbo Jiang , Kangjie Chen , Tianwei Zhang , Qingchuan Zhao , Guowen Xu

The open-endedness of large language models (LLMs) combined with their impressive capabilities may lead to new safety issues when being exploited for malicious use. While recent studies primarily focus on probing toxic outputs that can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Jiaxin Wen , Pei Ke , Hao Sun , Zhexin Zhang , Chengfei Li , Jinfeng Bai , Minlie Huang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have emerged as a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, representing a specialized class of large language models (LLMs) designed to tackle complex reasoning tasks. The defining characteristic of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Biao Yi , Zekun Fei , Jianing Geng , Tong Li , Lihai Nie , Zheli Liu , Yiming Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming vital tools that help us solve and understand complex problems by acting as digital assistants. LLMs can generate convincing explanations, even when only given the inputs and outputs of these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Rohan Ajwani , Shashidhar Reddy Javaji , Frank Rudzicz , Zining Zhu

Recent studies show that neural natural language processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Injected with backdoors, models perform normally on benign examples but produce attacker-specified predictions when the backdoor is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Fanchao Qi , Yuan Yao , Sophia Xu , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Large language models (LLMs) have shown state-of-the-art results in translating natural language questions into SQL queries (Text-to-SQL), a long-standing challenge within the database community. However, security concerns remain largely…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Meiyu Lin , Haichuan Zhang , Jiale Lao , Renyuan Li , Yuanchun Zhou , Carl Yang , Yang Cao , Mingjie Tang