arXiv AI

TextCloak: Safeguarding Data from Unauthorized LLM Fine-Tuning via RL-Driven Unlearnable Examples

TextCloak is a reinforcement‑learning driven framework that generates unlearnable examples (UEs) to protect textual data from unauthorized fine‑tuning of large language models (LLMs). It transforms clean text into perturbations that preserve meaning and naturalness while degrading the utility of models trained on them. Experiments on six datasets and nine LLMs show that TextCloak consistently impairs unauthorized fine‑tuning and remains robust across different architectures, training settings, and adaptive attacks.

arXiv AI
Aug 3

TextCloak: Thwarting Unauthorized LLM Exploitation via RL-Driven Unlearnable Text

arXiv:2607. 28862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advances across a wide range of language tasks, while simultaneously raising growing concerns about unauthorized data exploitation and privacy leakage.

By Chengshuai Zhao, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Zhiyuan Yu, Zhen Tan, Huan Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Open-Weight LLM Fine-Tuning Defenses are Susceptible to Simple Attacks

The paper examines the vulnerability of open‑weight large language model safeguards that aim to block harmful usage by assuming new harmful behavior arises only through fine‑tuning. It demonstrates that simple, low‑cost attacks—abliteration and prefilling—can significantly increase attack success rates across multiple benchmarks, and proposes an abliteration‑resistant tuning (ART) method that mitigates these attacks. The study shows that safeguarding defenses must be evaluated against a broader range of attack strategies beyond fine‑tuning.

By Kevin Kuo, Virginia Smith, Chhavi Yadav
arXiv AI
Sep 25

The Tokens Remember: When Tokenization Bypasses Knowledge Editing and Unlearning

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 AI
Oct 9

LTBD: Learnable Trust-Boundary Delimiters for Prompt Injection Defense

The paper introduces Learnable Trust‑Boundary Delimiters (LTBD), a lightweight defense that embeds learnable delimiters into LLM inputs to explicitly mark trusted user instructions versus untrusted external data. LTBD keeps the model’s parameters unchanged, achieving superior performance over inference‑time defenses and matching training‑based methods while adding negligible inference overhead. Experiments show near‑zero attack success rates on AlpacaFarm and TaskTracker, and the method remains robust even against adaptive attackers who know the defense.

By Luman Zhao, Minghui Xu, Yue Zhang, Yijun Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Watch your steps: Dormant Adversarial Behaviors that Activate upon LLM Finetuning

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
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Semantic Overlays: Mitigating Prompt Injection with Annotations Beyond Tokens and Steering Vectors

The paper introduces Semantic Overlays, a steering technique that adds non‑textual annotations to a language model’s input by applying learned adapters at specific prefill positions. These overlays create an out‑of‑band channel that encodes span identity and complex semantics, enabling the model to interpret marked text differently—such as rewriting code in a specified language or ignoring executable instructions. Experiments show that Semantic Overlays dramatically reduce prompt‑injection success rates while preserving model utility and readability of marked spans.

By Joshua Penman