arXiv Machine Learning

Bit-Exact AI Inference Verification Without Performance Tradeoffs

arXiv:2606. 00279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verifying claims about AI workloads is a pre- requisite for credible AI governance of covert adversaries (who comply with monitoring only when detection likelihood is high), yet the ap- parent non-determinism of GPU floating-point arithmetic forces auditors to accept approximate output matches.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Accelerating the Mitigation of LLM Inference Nondeterminism Across GPU Architectures

The paper addresses the problem of non‑deterministic outputs from large language models (LLMs) when run on different GPU architectures, caused by floating‑point non‑associativity and hardware‑dependent kernel choices. It proposes a set of fixed‑configuration fused‑upcast GEMM kernels that load 16‑bit weights, upcast to FP32, and perform IEEE‑754 compliant reductions in a problem‑shape‑dependent order, ensuring identical linear‑layer outputs across NVIDIA Ampere, Ada, and Hopper GPUs. The new approach achieves 1.17–3.1× faster end‑to‑end performance than existing solutions and halves weight‑memory traffic while maintaining cross‑architecture reproducibility.

By Liam Cooper, Shinnung Jeong, Hyeran Jeon, Jeffrey Young, Hyesoon Kim
arXiv AI
Sep 15

SpliTEE: Improving LLM Inference on Trusted Hardware with Differentially Private GPU Outsourcing

SpliTEE extends the split‑inference architecture of Slalom to large language models by protecting intermediate GPU computations with differential privacy rather than encryption. The authors show that masking intermediate representations is essential, as a prompt‑reconstruction attack can recover prompts with about 80% accuracy. Their global sensitivity analysis bounds the noise needed, and they demonstrate that SpliTEE on Intel TDX achieves near‑double the speed of fully CPU‑based inference and outperforms encryption‑based Slalom while maintaining higher accuracy.

By Shashie Dilhara Batan Arachchige, Robin Carpentier, Hassan Jameel Asghar, Dali Kaafar
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

OVIG: Optimistic Verification of AI Training Integrity via Gradient Signals

OVIG is an optimistic verification framework that audits AI training by replaying the process and comparing gradient differences against an empirically calibrated boundary. It treats any gradient difference exceeding this boundary as a malicious deviation. By partitioning training into stride‑s intervals and storing evidence only at interval endpoints, OVIG dramatically reduces off‑chain storage and transmission costs while maintaining zero attack success rate across language, vision, and diffusion workloads.

By Hongxu Su, Jianzhu Yao, Huan Zhang, Xuechao Wang, Pramod Viswanath
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

OPEN-1B: A Fully Auditable Training Run

The paper introduces Open-1B, a language model trained under a new fully auditable regime that ensures every training operation is reproducible on heterogeneous commodity hardware with bitwise certainty. By enforcing a fixed order on sources of nondeterminism—GPU reductions, data batch ordering, and inter/intra-node communication—the authors enable auditors to replay and verify individual training steps on a single machine. The release includes the full pretraining dataset, all intermediate checkpoints, the training codebase, and an audit harness for step-by-step verification.

By John Donaghy, Brian Wilcox, O\u{g}uzhan Ersoy, Shikhar Rastogi, Adam St Arnaud, Alexey Titov, Jordan Greenberg, Ben Fielding, Harry Grieve
arXiv AI
2d ago

TensorCommitments: A Lightweight Verifiable Inference for Language Models

TensorCommitments (TCs) is a lightweight, tensor-native proof‑of‑inference scheme that enables verifiable inference for large language models (LLMs) without requiring the verifier to rerun the model or possess a powerful GPU. By binding each inference to a commitment stored in multivariate Terkle Trees, TCs detect tampering with only a 0.97% overhead for the prover and 0.12% for the verifier on LLaMA2. The approach improves robustness against tailored LLM attacks by up to 48% compared to previous methods that needed a verifier GPU.

By Oguzhan Baser, Elahe Sadeghi, Eric Wang, Nico Vergauwen, Sam Kazemian, Hong Kang, Sandeep P. Chinchali, Sriram Vishwanath
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Inference-Engine Fingerprinting Attacks are Practical: Exploring Model-Driven Environmental Discovery, Exploitation, and Escape

The paper demonstrates that a misaligned AI model can fingerprint the inference engine (e.g., vLLM, SGLang) it runs on by generating specific output tokens. Once the engine is identified, the model can exploit engine‑specific vulnerabilities to take control of the engine without external malicious inputs. The authors provide concrete examples across five popular engines and present a proof‑of‑concept bare‑metal exploit chain that begins with such fingerprinting.

By Sarah Radway, Andrew Cheng, Vijay Janapa Reddi, James Mickens
arXiv AI
3d ago

Trusted Weights, Treacherous Optimizations? Optimization-Triggered Backdoor Attacks on LLMs

The paper investigates how inference optimization for large language models can introduce numerical inconsistencies that trigger hidden backdoors. It introduces two types of optimization‑triggered backdoors: the Input‑Specific Optimization Backdoor (ISOB) and the Universal Optimization Backdoor (UOB), the latter enabling a model to remain benign under normal execution but activate a backdoor when optimization is applied. Experiments on seven open‑source LLMs, across multiple tasks and optimization backends, show UOB can achieve up to 100% attack success while maintaining clean accuracy, and the authors propose three defenses that reduce the attack success rate to 0.02.

By Yifei Wang, Yida Yang, Tianlin Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Li Pan