arXiv AI

Defending Against Harmful Supervision Hidden in Benign Samples

arXiv:2606. 30263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing defenses are effective when harmful content is explicitly mixed into downstream fine-tuning data, but crafted samples can instead hide harmful supervision inside benign tasks.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

Phantom Transfer: Data Poisoning can Survive Data-Level Defences

arXiv:2602. 04899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a data poisoning attack -- Phantom Transfer -- with the property that, even if you know precisely how the poison was placed into an otherwise benign dataset, you cannot filter it out.

By Andrew Draganov, Tolga H. Dur, Anandmayi Bhongade, Mary Phuong
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Hidden Threat in Synthetic Data: Covert Targeted Bias Injection through Benign Text

The paper examines how synthetic data can be used to covertly inject targeted social biases into aligned large language models. By having a misaligned teacher model generate filtered synthetic datasets in domains like creative writing and code generation, the authors fine‑tune aligned student models and demonstrate that the benign‑looking data can transmit biases while preserving general task performance. The study highlights a security risk in synthetic data‑driven LLM training pipelines and proposes log‑linearity‑based scoring as a potential safeguard.

By Minkyung Cho, Jihyo Kim, SeungWoo Song, Junghun Yuk, Minjoon Kee, Hoyun Song, KyungTae Lim
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Safety-Aligned Weights Are Not Enough: Refusal-Teacher-Guided Finetuning Enhances Safety and Downstream Performance under Harmful Finetuning Attacks

arXiv:2506.07356v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Finetuning-as-a-Service (FaaS) enables customization of Large Language Models (LLMs) using user data, this service is vulnerable to safety de...

By Seokil Ham, Yubin Choi, Yujin Yang, Seungju Cho, Younghun Kim, Changick Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Do Models Share Safety Representations? Cross-Model Steering for Safe Visual Generation

arXiv:2606. 05290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture.

By Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Sara Sarto, Florian Schiffers, Garin Kessler, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 7

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Learning the Backdoor to Remove the Backdoor

The community has recently developed various training-time defenses to counter neural backdoors introduced through data poisoning. In light of the observation that a model learns poisonous samples responsible for the backdoor easier than benign samples, these approaches either use a fixed threshold of the training loss for splitting or iteratively learn a reference model as an oracle for identifying benign samples.