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Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to a sophisticated form of adversarial prompting known as camouflaged jailbreaking. This method embeds malicious intent within seemingly benign language to evade existing safety…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Youjia Zheng , Mohammad Zandsalimy , Shanu Sushmita

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the development of embodied intelligence. By providing a few contextual demonstrations, developers can utilize the extensive internal knowledge of LLMs to effortlessly translate complex tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Aishan Liu , Yuguang Zhou , Xianglong Liu , Tianyuan Zhang , Siyuan Liang , Jiakai Wang , Yanjun Pu , Tianlin Li , Junqi Zhang , Wenbo Zhou , Qing Guo , Dacheng Tao

Large language model (LLM) agents execute tasks through multi-step workflows that combine planning, memory, and tool use. While this design enables autonomy, it also expands the attack surface for backdoor threats. Backdoor triggers…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yunhao Feng , Yige Li , Yutao Wu , Yingshui Tan , Yanming Guo , Yifan Ding , Kun Zhai , Xingjun Ma , Yu-Gang Jiang

Backdoor Attacks have been a serious vulnerability against Large Language Models (LLMs). However, previous methods only reveal such risk in specific models, or present tasks transferability after attacking the pre-trained phase. So, how…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Pengzhou Cheng , Zongru Wu , Tianjie Ju , Wei Du , Zhuosheng Zhang Gongshen Liu

Since the advent of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but remain as black-box systems. Understanding the reasoning bottlenecks of LLMs has become a critical challenge, as these limitations are deeply tied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zifan Zheng , Yezhaohui Wang , Yuxin Huang , Shichao Song , Mingchuan Yang , Bo Tang , Feiyu Xiong , Zhiyu Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in real-world decision-making tasks for embodied artificial intelligence, especially when fine-tuned to leverage their inherent common sense and reasoning abilities while being…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Ruochen Jiao , Shaoyuan Xie , Justin Yue , Takami Sato , Lixu Wang , Yixuan Wang , Qi Alfred Chen , Qi Zhu

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on multi-turn reasoning datasets requires N (number of turns) separate forward passes per conversation due to reasoning token visibility constraints, as reasoning tokens for a turn are discarded in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Ritesh Goru , Shanay Mehta , Prateek Jain

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong linguistic capabilities, but little is known about how they encode psycholinguistic knowledge across languages. We investigate whether and how LLMs exhibit human-like psycholinguistic responses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Shuzhou Yuan , Zhan Qu , Mario Tawfelis , Michael Färber

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jie Ren , Qipeng Guo , Hang Yan , Dongrui Liu , Quanshi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Driven by the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have been developed to handle various real-world applications, including finance, healthcare, and shopping, etc. It is crucial to ensure the reliability and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Wenkai Yang , Xiaohan Bi , Yankai Lin , Sishuo Chen , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

Large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly bottlenecked by the Key-Value (KV) cache, yet the fine-grained structure of attention-head activations remains poorly understood. We show that pretrained Transformers exhibit a pervasive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Khalid Shaikh , Asmit Kumar Singh , Rebecca Christopher Dsouza , Shikhar Shiromani

With the rise of advanced reasoning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) are receiving increasing attention. However, although reasoning improves LLMs' performance on downstream tasks, it also introduces new security risks, as…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Man Hu , Xinyi Wu , Zuofeng Suo , Jinbo Feng , Linghui Meng , Yanhao Jia , Anh Tuan Luu , Shuai Zhao

The rapid adoption of Large Language Model (LLM) agents and multi-agent systems enables remarkable capabilities in natural language processing and generation. However, these systems introduce security vulnerabilities that extend beyond…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Matteo Lupinacci , Francesco Aurelio Pironti , Francesco Blefari , Francesco Romeo , Luigi Arena , Angelo Furfaro

Prompts have significantly improved the performance of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) on various downstream tasks recently, making them increasingly indispensable for a diverse range of LLM application scenarios. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Hongwei Yao , Jian Lou , Zhan Qin

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are shown to be vulnerable to minor word changes, which poses a big threat to real-world systems. While previous studies directly focus on manipulating word inputs, they are limited by their means of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Khai Jiet Liong , Hongqiu Wu , Hai Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be backdoored to exhibit malicious behavior under specific deployment conditions while appearing safe during training a phenomenon known as "sleeper agents." Recent work by Hubinger et al. demonstrated that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Shahin Zanbaghi , Ryan Rostampour , Farhan Abid , Salim Al Jarmakani

Backdoor attacks are a significant threat to the performance and integrity of pre-trained language models. Although such models are routinely fine-tuned for downstream NLP tasks, recent work shows they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Santosh Chapagain , Shah Muhammad Hamdi , Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi

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

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performance, but are also vulnerable to backdoor attacks whereby the adversary can manipulate the model's outputs through hidden triggers. Prior attacks primarily rely on single-modality…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Zhiyuan Zhong , Zhen Sun , Yepang Liu , Xinlei He , Guanhong Tao