The paper introduces Checkerboard, a clean‑label backdoor attack that uses a closed‑form, data‑independent trigger design based on an input‑space Fisher‑separability objective and a ridge four‑neighbor local‑smoothness prior. This approach yields a pixel‑wise checkerboard trigger without requiring data access, surrogate model training, or iterative optimization, and it outperforms existing norm‑bounded clean‑label attacks across four benchmark datasets. On CIFAR‑10, poisoning 20 samples with a 10/255 perturbation achieves a 95.72% attack success rate, while on IN‑100 a 0.4% global poisoning rate yields over 83% ASR without harming clean accuracy, and the attack remains robust against state‑of‑the‑art defenses.
By Yi Yang, Jinyang Huang, Binbin Liu, Feng-Qi Cui, Xiaokang Zhou, Haiming Jin, Zhi Liu, Jie Zhang, Meng Li
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
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:2508. 04064v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Horizontal federated learning (HFL) backdoor audits often summarize model behavior through clean accuracy (CA), mean attack success rate (ASR), or a single known-trigger test.
By Tuan Nguyen, Sze Jue Yang, Khoa D. Doan, Chee Seng Chan, Kok-Seng Wong
arXiv:2609.07147v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Federated learning, as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm, faces significant threats from backdoor attacks. Compared to central...
By Jian Wang, Hong Shen, Wei Ke, Xue Hua Liu
The paper introduces Quarantined Expert Shutdown (QES), a new backdoor containment strategy for large language models. QES allows backdoor learning to occur during training but routes it into a designated, quarantined expert that can be disabled at deployment. The method achieves significant reductions in attack success rates while largely preserving model utility.
By Jianwei Li, Min-Seon Kim, Jung-Eun Kim
arXiv:2507. 05113v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison training data to implant backdoor into the victim model.
By Binyan Xu, Fan Yang, Xilin Dai, Di Tang, Kehuan Zhang
arXiv:2505. 19532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The current state-of-the-art backdoor attacks against Reinforcement Learning (RL) rely upon unrealistically permissive access models, that assume the attacker can read (or even write) the victim's policy parameters, observations, or rewards.
By Shijie Liu, Andrew C. Cullen, Paul Montague, Sarah Erfani, Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein
arXiv:2609.31558v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has emerged as a dominant vision backbone due to its strong transferability and zero-shot capabilities....
By Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
arXiv:2608. 05045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Released aligned large language models remain vulnerable to malicious downstream finetuning.
By Yuxuan Huang, Xingyu Zeng, Tianhang Zheng, Chaochao Lu
arXiv:2607. 19430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM applications chain a planner, worker agents, a verifier, and a synthesizer, and every hop between agents is an unmonitored channel through which an adversary can smuggle instructions.
By Elias Hossain, Md Mehedi Hasan Nipu, Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Tasfia Nuzhat Ornee, Maleeha Sheikh
arXiv:2606. 29441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists.
By Subhadip Mitra