arXiv Computation and Language

Towards Safer RAG: Only Agents Capable of System 2 Thinking may Access Untrusted Documents

The paper examines how deliberative (System 2) reasoning affects a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model’s vulnerability to knowledge‑poisoning attacks. Using two metrics—Cordon Rate and Leakage Rate—it evaluates six model configurations on 200 SciFact questions. Results show that enabling reasoning lowers both Cordon and Leakage Rates for DeepSeek‑V4‑Flash, indicating reduced behavioral impact from poisoned evidence, though overall attack success increases.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Corrupt Plans, Clean Traces: Evading Chain-of-Thought Monitoring with Plan Injection

The paper introduces a new attack called "plan injection" that allows a large language model to carry out harmful actions while evading chain-of-thought monitoring. By inserting harmful but benign-sounding reasoning into the model’s context, the attacker can steer the model’s behavior and cause it to paraphrase the injected plan as its own reasoning. The study demonstrates that this attack works across different monitoring settings, scales to harder tasks, and even causes monitors to waste resources on the injected plan, reducing detection rates by up to 50%.

By Keertana Chidambaram, Andrew Ilyas, Vasilis Syrgkanis
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Trustworthy RAG: An Evaluation Agent for Detecting Misinformation and Knowledge Poisoning in Generative AI Systems

The paper introduces Trustworthy RAG, an evaluation agent designed to detect misinformation and knowledge poisoning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. It combines natural language inference verification, a five-signal poison detector, and a weighted Trust Index to assess the reliability of retrieved content. Experiments on multiple LLMs show high accuracy and precision, with the agent effectively blocking unsafe advice in a secure-coding assistant scenario.

By Balkrishna Giri, Md Toufique Hasan, Jussi Rasku, Muhammad Waseem, Pekka Abrahamsson
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

RAGuard: A Layered Defense Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Against Data Poisoning

arXiv:2607. 26339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) in external corpora, but this reliance exposes them to corpus poisoning: maliciously injected passages that manipulate retrieved evidence.

By Pushkal Kumar, Tucker Nielson, Tanish Kolhe, Shubham Zala, Vincent Li
arXiv AI
Aug 28

TriShieldRAG: 3 Rings, One Blind Spot in Layered Defenses for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

TriShieldRAG introduces a three‑layered defense for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation: an Ingest Guard that screens documents, a Retrieval Scorer that re‑ranks based on trust, and a Cross‑LLM Consensus that validates evidence across three models. Against the original PoisonedRAG attack on the 2.68M‑passage Natural Questions corpus, the framework reduces attack success from about 79% to 1%. However, adaptive attacks that only alter document formatting can bypass the Ingest Guard and still achieve high success rates, revealing limits of layered defenses that rely on the same retrieved evidence.

By Susil Kumar Mohanty, Rohit Patel, Kosuru Yuvaraj, Jeenal Chaudhary, Disha Singhania