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.
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:2606. 05958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has become a popular way to control Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without fine-tuning.
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.
arXiv:2608. 00566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-hoc model explainers such as LIME, SHAP, and Integrated Gradients are widely deployed to audit models in high-stakes sensitive domains, including finance, healthcare, and social welfare.
The paper introduces the SAST-IR framework to evaluate large language models’ robustness against persuasion attacks in a memory‑less setting, revealing a flaw called "Refusal Inertia" that masks true vulnerability. Using the CP‑Agent and a custom CounterFact‑Strict dataset, the authors demonstrate that simple, diverse attack strategies achieve a 96% success rate, while complex attacks often trigger defensive compliance. The study highlights severe brittleness in current state‑of‑the‑art models when deprived of conversation history.
The paper introduces ADVERSA, an automated red‑teaming framework that evaluates large language model safety over multiple turns by tracking continuous compliance trajectories instead of binary jailbreak outcomes. Using a fine‑tuned 70B attacker model and a structured 5‑point rubric, the authors conduct controlled experiments on three frontier victim models, measuring guardrail degradation and judge reliability through a triple‑judge consensus. Results show a 26.7% jailbreak rate with most breaches occurring early, and the study documents inter‑judge agreement, attacker drift, and attacker refusals as key factors affecting safety assessment.
arXiv:2605. 17480v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent systems extend large language models (LLMs) by decomposing tasks among specialized agents, but their distributed decision process creates new attack surfaces.
arXiv:2606. 11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly.
The paper introduces a counterfactually anchored evidence attribution approach for multi‑turn large language model safety failures. It presents a new dataset of 1,762 conversations, including adversarial, benign twins, and high‑risk vocabulary variants, and trains a lightweight hierarchical model that accurately predicts safety violations and attributes them to specific user turns and token spans. The model achieves high detection performance (F1 = 0.988) and significantly reduces adversarial confidence when top‑attributed tokens are removed, while maintaining low false‑positive rates on benign conversations.
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.
arXiv:2606. 05614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content.