arXiv Machine Learning

Steering Vectors are an Adversarial Attack Surface

arXiv:2606. 05958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has become a popular way to control Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without fine-tuning.

arXiv AI
2d ago

UniGuardian: A Unified Defense for Detecting Prompt Injection, Backdoor Attacks and Adversarial Attacks in Large Language Models

UniGuardian is a training‑free detector for large language models that jointly identifies prompt injection, backdoor, and adversarial attacks—collectively called Prompt Trigger Attacks (PTA). It measures how structured prompt perturbations shift the model’s output distribution and uses a single‑forward strategy to detect attacks while generating text in a shared batched forward pass. Experiments show that UniGuardian accurately and efficiently identifies trigger‑activated prompts in LLMs.

By Huawei Lin, Yingjie Lao, Tony Geng, Tan Yu, Weijie Zhao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

Safety Targeted Embedding Exploit via Refinement

Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching. We show that this creates an epistemic gap in which models confidently generate harmful responses for inputs that fall outside the distribution of their safety training.

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
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
Jul 9

NonTextual Target Attack

arXiv:2510. 02999v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing gradient-based jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically optimize adversarial suffixes to align the LLM output with predefined target responses.

By Xinzhe Huang, Wenjing Hu, Tianhang Zheng, Kedong Xiu, Hongsheng Hu, Xiaojun Jia, Di Wang, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren