The paper introduces TRACE, a lightweight framework for detecting corpus poisoning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. TRACE works by tracing answer-related tokens through token influence attribution, first identifying recurrent high-influence keywords across retrieved documents and then verifying their impact on model predictions. Experiments on three QA benchmarks and six large language models show that TRACE achieves strong detection performance while also revealing attacker-specified target answers.
arXiv:2608. 02678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning: an attacker who inserts a crafted document into the retrieval corpus can steer the underlying large language model (LLM) toward an attacker-chosen wrong answer.
arXiv:2609.00470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external corpora, but implicit trust in retrieved documents creates a critical at...
arXiv:2609.01325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural ranking models have become core components of modern information retrieval systems and important building blocks of AI systems such as retrieval...
arXiv:2606. 11265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate downstream model outputs through malicious knowledge injection.
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.
RAGSentinel is a training‑free, label‑free defense designed for black‑box retrieval‑augmented generation systems. It employs a surrogate encoder to detect hidden‑state shifts caused by retrieved documents, removes shared topic directions, and filters poisoned documents as geometric outliers from a robust majority consensus. The method is proven to recover a poison‑free majority context under honest‑majority and representation‑separation assumptions, and experiments show it keeps attack success rates low while maintaining accuracy across multiple datasets, LLM families, and adaptive attacks.
arXiv:2607. 00012v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge, effectively mitigating their inherent knowledge limitations.
arXiv:2606. 28358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance the trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding their outputs in external documents, often using inline citations for verifiability.
arXiv:2606. 02643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-enhanced LLM systems, while powerful, introduce substantial inference costs due to the inclusion of an extra multi-stage pipeline that dynamically retrieves and synthesizes information from external knowledge sources.
arXiv:2603. 22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface.
arXiv:2607. 15267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Poisoning pretraining data can introduce harmful behaviors to LMs that are difficult to detect and mitigate.
The paper surveys attacks and defenses in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that improves large language models by grounding outputs in external knowledge. It identifies new robustness and security risks such as corpus poisoning, backdoor attacks, privacy leakage, and fairness violations, and notes that existing surveys inadequately cover attacker objectives, threat models, and stage-specific defenses. The survey offers a unified, pipeline-aware overview, formalizing threat models across the corpus, retriever, and generator, categorizing attacks by accuracy, privacy, and fairness, and reviewing defenses for retrieval, rerank, generation, and traceback stages, while also summarizing robustness benchmarks and explainability methods.