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Backdoors can be injected into NLP models to induce misbehavior when the input text contains a specific feature, known as a trigger, which the attacker secretly selects. Unlike fixed words, phrases, or sentences used in the static text…
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…
Current backdoor defenses assume that neutralizing a known trigger removes the backdoor. We show this trigger-centric view is incomplete: \emph{alternative triggers}, patterns perceptually distinct from training triggers, reliably activate…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multi-hop reasoning, yet how they internally compose multiple facts remains unclear. Recent work proposes \emph{hop-aligned circuit hypothesis}, suggesting that bridge entities are computed…
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…
Recent studies have revealed that \textit{Backdoor Attacks} can threaten the safety of natural language processing (NLP) models. Investigating the strategies of backdoor attacks will help to understand the model's vulnerability. Most…
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable success in multilingual translation, their internal core translation mechanisms, even at the fundamental word level, remain insufficiently understood. To address this critical gap,…
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) can process many languages, yet how they internally represent this diversity remains unclear. Do they form shared multilingual representations with language-specific decoding, and if so, why does…
Emergent misalignment poses risks to AI safety as language models are increasingly used for autonomous tasks. In this paper, we present a population of large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on insecure datasets spanning 11 diverse…
Language confusion -- where large language models (LLMs) generate unintended languages against the user's need -- remains a critical challenge, especially for English-centric models. We present the first mechanistic interpretability (MI)…
Transformer-based language models have achieved significant success; however, their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque due to the complexity of non-linear interactions and high-dimensional operations. While previous studies have…
Ensuring the safety and alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is crucial for generating responses that are beneficial to humanity. While LLMs have the capability to identify and avoid harmful queries, they remain…
In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, early-exit refers to stopping computation at an intermediate layer once the prediction is sufficiently confident, thereby reducing latency and cost. However, recent LLMs adopt improved pretraining…
Safety-aligned language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet refusal behavior can be suppressed by steering their internal representations. Existing methods do so by ablating a refusal direction from model activations, aiming…
In this paper we introduce Latent Tree Language Model (LTLM), a novel approach to language modeling that encodes syntax and semantics of a given sentence as a tree of word roles. The learning phase iteratively updates the trees by moving…
Language Models (LMs) are becoming increasingly popular in real-world applications. Outsourcing model training and data hosting to third-party platforms has become a standard method for reducing costs. In such a situation, the attacker can…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities but continue to struggle with arithmetic tasks. Prior works largely focus on outputs or prompting strategies, leaving the open question of the internal…
When a language model generates text, the selection of individual tokens might lead it down very different reasoning paths, making uncertainty difficult to quantify. In this work, we consider whether reasoning language models represent the…