English
Related papers

Related papers: MetaBackdoor: Exploiting Positional Encoding as a …

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to Jailbreaking attacks, which aim to extract harmful information by subtly modifying the attack query. As defense mechanisms evolve, directly obtaining harmful information becomes increasingly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Yixin Cheng , Markos Georgopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Grigorios G. Chrysos

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

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is pervasively exploited in training high-quality upstream encoders with a large amount of unlabeled data. However, it is found to be susceptible to backdoor attacks merely via polluting a small portion of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Sizai Hou , Songze Li , Duanyi Yao

Early research into data poisoning attacks against Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrated the ease with which backdoors could be injected. More recent LLMs add step-by-step reasoning, expanding the attack surface to include the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Hanna Foerster , Ilia Shumailov , Yiren Zhao , Harsh Chaudhari , Jamie Hayes , Robert Mullins , Yarin Gal

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

Prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks against prompt-based models consider injecting backdoors into the entire embedding layers or word embedding vectors. Such attacks can be easily affected by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Kai Mei , Zheng Li , Zhenting Wang , Yang Zhang , Shiqing Ma

Deep learning is becoming increasingly popular in real-life applications, especially in natural language processing (NLP). Users often choose training outsourcing or adopt third-party data and models due to data and computation resources…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Xuan Sheng , Zhaoyang Han , Piji Li , Xiangmao Chang

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing attention. Due to the heterogeneity of their input features, they face significant challenges in terms of jailbreak defenses. Current defense methods rely on costly fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xinyi Zeng , Xue Yang , Jingyuan Zhang , Huanqian Yan , Xiang Chen , Kaiwen Wei , Hankun Kang , Yu Tian

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, but their safety and morality remain contentious due to their training on internet text corpora. To address these concerns, alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Mohammad Bahrami Karkevandi , Nishant Vishwamitra , Peyman Najafirad

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and decision-making by leveraging external tools. However, this tool-centric paradigm introduces a previously underexplored attack surface,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Kanghua Mo , Li Hu , Yucheng Long , Zhihao Li

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to benefit from chain-of-thought (COT) prompting, particularly when tackling tasks that require systematic reasoning processes. On the other hand, COT prompting also poses new vulnerabilities in the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Zhen Xiang , Fengqing Jiang , Zidi Xiong , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran , Bo Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed exceptionally in various text-generative tasks, including question answering, translation, code completion, etc. However, the over-assistance of LLMs has raised the challenge of "jailbreaking",…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Sibo Yi , Yule Liu , Zhen Sun , Tianshuo Cong , Xinlei He , Jiaxing Song , Ke Xu , Qi Li

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

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world pipelines, yet this deployment also enlarges the supply-chain attack surface: adversaries can distribute backdoored checkpoints that behave normally under…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Rui Yin , Tianxu Han , Naen Xu , Changjiang Li , Ping He , Chunyi Zhou , Jun Wang , Zhihui Fu , Tianyu Du , Jinbao Li , Shouling Ji

Poisoning of data sets is a potential security threat to large language models that can lead to backdoored models. A description of the internal mechanisms of backdoored language models and how they process trigger inputs, e.g., when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Max Lamparth , Anka Reuel

This paper proposes a jailbreaking prompt detection method for large language models (LLMs) to defend against jailbreak attacks. Although recent LLMs are equipped with built-in safeguards, it remains possible to craft jailbreaking prompts…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zheng Lin , Zhenxing Niu , Haoxuan Ji , Yuzhe Huang , Haichang Gao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in applications that accept user-submitted content, such as uploaded documents or pasted text, for tasks like summarization and question answering. In this paper, we identify a new class of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhuotao Lian , Weiyu Wang , Qingkui Zeng , Toru Nakanishi , Teruaki Kitasuka , Chunhua Su

Backdoor attacks manipulate model predictions by inserting innocuous triggers into training and test data. We focus on more realistic and more challenging clean-label attacks where the adversarial training examples are correctly labeled.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Wencong You , Zayd Hammoudeh , Daniel Lowd

Recently, advanced NLP models have seen a surge in the usage of various applications. This raises the security threats of the released models. In addition to the clean models' unintentional weaknesses, {\em i.e.,} adversarial attacks, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-18 Lichao Sun

It has been proved that deep neural networks are facing a new threat called backdoor attacks, where the adversary can inject backdoors into the neural network model through poisoning the training dataset. When the input containing some…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Chuanshuai Chen , Jiazhu Dai