arXiv:2310. 16152v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) has become a key component in various language modeling applications such as machine translation, next-word prediction, and medical record analysis.
By Md Rafi Ur Rashid, Vishnu Asutosh Dasu, Kang Gu, Najrin Sultana, Shagufta Mehnaz
The paper introduces FAB, an attack that uses meta‑learning to embed dormant adversarial behaviors into large language models (LLMs). These behaviors remain inactive until the model is finetuned by downstream users, at which point the model can exhibit unwanted actions such as unsolicited advertising, jailbreakability, or over‑refusal. FAB is shown to be effective across multiple LLMs and resilient to various finetuning settings.
By Thibaud Gloaguen, Mark Vero, Robin Staab, Martin Vechev
FedLNS is a server‑side framework that screens federated learning updates by representing each client’s contribution through changes in trainable normalization‑layer parameters, creating lightweight signatures that can be compared against a history‑aware cross‑client reference. The method requires no extra client‑to‑server communication, raw data, or labeled attack examples, and after screening, the remaining full‑model updates are aggregated with standard federated learning rules. Experiments on GPT‑style, BERT‑style, and LLaMA‑style models with 200 clients demonstrate that FedLNS achieves lower test perplexity than six baselines even when 40% of the population performs target manipulation under both IID and non‑IID data partitions.
By Kai Li, Jong-Ik Park, Carlee Joe-Wong, Wei Ni, Falko Dressler
arXiv:2601. 07177v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) addresses privacy and data-silo issues in the training of large language models (LLMs).
By Mingxiang Tao, Yu Tian, Wenxuan Tu, Yue Yang, Xue Yang, Xiangyan Tang
The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.
By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
The paper evaluates privacy risks in graph neural networks enhanced by large language models (LLMs). Using a five‑stage framework, the authors test six real‑world text‑attributed graph datasets with 42 model configurations and six privacy attack methods across link, label, and membership inference threats. Results show that LLM‑enhanced GNNs are more vulnerable than shallow baselines, with semantic enrichment amplifying exploitable signals, and that differential privacy can reduce risk but at a significant cost to utility.
By Longzhu He, Zelang Wen, Chaozhuo Li, Sen Su
arXiv:2607. 06649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on cross-modal tasks by jointly training on large-scale textual and visual data, where privacy-sensitive examples could be unintentionally encoded, raising concerns about privacy or copyright violation.
By Zhangheng LI, Jianing Zhu, Junyuan Hong, Sungmin Eum, Shuowen Hu, Suya You, Zhangyang Wang
The paper investigates how tokenization can undermine post‑release guarantees that sensitive knowledge has been edited or unlearned from open‑weight large language models. By showing that alternative valid tokenizations can bypass localized modifications, the authors introduce Toketive, a reference‑free attack that detects modified knowledge and reconstructs pre‑edit responses using only the released model. Experiments on five LLMs, six datasets, and six editing techniques reveal that 38.6% of alternative tokenizations recover suppressed information, with Toketive achieving high detection and reconstruction accuracy.
By Manit Baser, Aditya Nawal, Dinil Mon Divakaran, Mohan Gurusamy
arXiv:2608. 06637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust aggregation methods are widely used in federated learning to mitigate the impact of adversarial client behavior.
By Srinivasan Subramanian, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan, Kazi Aminul Islam
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on cross-modal tasks by jointly training on large-scale textual and visual data, where privacy-sensitive examples could be unintentionally encoded, raising concerns about privacy or copyright violation. To this end, Multi-modality Machine Unlearning (MMU) was proposed as a mitigation that can effectively force MLLMs to forget private information.
arXiv:2606. 17110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets.
By Md Abdullah Al Mamun, Ngoc Phu Doan, Pedram Zaree, Ihsen Alouani, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh
arXiv:2606. 31742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) methods have demonstrated significant success in recent years at identifying relevant features in input data that drive deep learning model decisions, enhancing interpretability for users.
By Maximilian Andreas Hoefler, Karsten Mueller, Wojciech Samek