arXiv Machine Learning

Poisoning-Based Backdoors Are Not Cryptographic

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

arXiv:2607. 26849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time.

By Anthony Hughes, Nicole Xing, Collin Francel, Andy Kim, Andrew Draganov
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Provable one-poison backdoor attacks on linear models and ReLU neural networks

The paper demonstrates that a single poisoned data point can successfully create a backdoor in linear models and ReLU neural networks without needing detailed knowledge of the training data. It establishes provable conditions under which this one‑poison attack works with high probability, achieving zero backdooring error while leaving the model’s normal performance largely unaffected. The attack relies only on coarse geometric bounds of the input space and training parameters.

By Thorsten Peinemann, Paula Arnold, Sebastian Berndt, Thomas Eisenbarth, Esfandiar Mohammadi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time. We ask whether a defender can recover such a trigger under realistic affordances, namely white-box access to the weights and knowledge of the behavior of concern, but no training data, no trusted reference model, no knowledge of the trigger, and no certainty that the model is poisoned.

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Backdoor Containment via Expert Quarantine and Shutdown in LLMs

The paper introduces Quarantined Expert Shutdown (QES), a new backdoor containment strategy for large language models. QES allows backdoor learning to occur during training but routes it into a designated, quarantined expert that can be disabled at deployment. The method achieves significant reductions in attack success rates while largely preserving model utility.

By Jianwei Li, Min-Seon Kim, Jung-Eun Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Why Backdooring Neural Networks is so Easy?

arXiv:2609.36117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Securing modern AI systems against backdoor attacks remains an open challenge and requires fundamentally principled estimates of the adversary's budget...

By Issam Seddik, Mohamed El Amine Seddik