The paper introduces Paraesthesia, a dynamic backdoor attack that uses emotionally styled inputs as triggers for large language models. By mapping target emotions into a valence–arousal space and rewriting a small subset of clean samples, the attack achieves over 98% success while minimally affecting clean performance. Experiments on four major LLMs show that the trigger cannot be fully explained by token-level cues and remains robust against several filtering and mitigation techniques.
arXiv:2607. 19894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs.
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.
The paper introduces the ASCII Attack, a single‑turn, black‑box method that embeds a harmful request within ASCII art and presents it as artwork to a large language model. By framing the request as artistic critique, the model can provide operational details that a plain request would normally be refused. Experiments across eleven models and eight harm topics show that the attack succeeds in 62% of cases versus 42% for direct controls, with the most vulnerable model achieving a 93% success rate.
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs. Existing defenses generally fall into inference-time detection or training-time mitigation, but face two key limitations.
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:2609.22119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluation awareness poses an unprecedented threat to model evaluation, but the mechanisms by which models detect it remain unknown. This study focus...
arXiv:2609.24801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in production systems, raising concerns about their exposure to adversarial manipulation throu...
arXiv:2510.17904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used because they process structures, syntax and code well, but this same ability also makes them par...
arXiv:2508. 10029v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models can still be manipulated through white-box interventions that modify their internal representations.
arXiv:2606. 07963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) are often treated as isolated trigger-response failures, motivating defenses tailored to specific triggers or behaviors.
arXiv:2610.07723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing LLM backdoors are almost all input-centric: activat...
arXiv:2606. 27091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs fine-tuned for security classification are usually evaluated on held-out examples from the same distribution as their training data.