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.
By Yueyang Quan, Anjun Gao, Yufei Xia, Minghong Fang, Zhuqing Liu
RAG-CT is a defense mechanism designed to protect Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems from leaking personally identifiable information (PII). It works by detecting malicious queries through analysis of entropy and margin distributions, applying a score-based detection method. Experiments across four attack strategies and four baseline defenses on two datasets show that RAG-CT significantly reduces PII leakage while outperforming existing defenses, all without altering the underlying LLM or retriever.
By Xingyu Lyu, Jiayimei Wang, Jianfeng He, Ning Wang, Yidan Hu, Yimin Chen
arXiv:2607. 04718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents decompose open-ended queries into subtasks, retrieve web evidence over multiple rounds, and synthesize long-form reports.
By Yue Pan, Ziheng Zhang, Junxiang Lei, Changhao Jia, Qingyi Si, Hongcheng Guo
arXiv:2406.00083v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant information from external knowledge bases t...
By Jiaqi Xue, Mengxin Zheng, Yebowen Hu, Fei Liu, Xun Chen, Qian Lou
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.
By Xiangyu Yin, Yi Qi, Chih-Hong Cheng
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.
By Chengliang Liu, Liangbo Ning, Yujuan Ding, Wenqi Fan
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.
By Minh Tran, Cuong Dang, Tuc Nguyen, Khanh-Tung Tran, Minh Huynh Nguyen, Trinh Chau, Kien Le, Do Xuan Long, Jiahao Zhang, Hoang D. Nguyen, Thanh Le, Suhang Wang
arXiv:2609.38270v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Advancing beyond traditional static scoring models, LLM-powered agentic recommender systems (LLM-ARS) instantiate users and items as autonomous agent...
By Yurong Hao, Wen Zhou, Guowei Guan, Tiantong Wu, Fuyao Zhang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
arXiv:2607. 15267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Poisoning pretraining data can introduce harmful behaviors to LMs that are difficult to detect and mitigate.
By Victoria Graf, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Noah A. Smith, David Kohlbrenner, Kyle Lo
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.
By Abay Zhurekbay, Tao Liu, Fan Li
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.
By Xi Nie, Hongwei Li, Shenghao Wu, Mingxuan Li, Jiachen Li, Wenbo Jiang
The paper presents an agentic framework for detecting conspiratorial content in social media by inferring the speaker’s intent rather than merely identifying explicit claims. It leverages social context and adaptive tool use, demonstrating superior performance over text-only and non-agentic models on a large Hebrew tweet dataset spanning election cycles and the COVID pandemic. The study highlights the importance of context-aware, reasoning-driven approaches for accurate conspiracy detection.
By Lior Biton, Oren Tsur