arXiv AI
AGENTQ: Quantization-Conditioned Backdoor Attacks on LLM Agents
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
Related stories
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30
FlipGuard: Defending Large Language Models Against Quantization-Conditioned Backdoor Attacks
arXiv:2606. 28962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model quantization is essential for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), but introduces a critical vulnerability: Quantization-Conditioned Backdoor (QCB) attacks.
arXiv AI
Jun 4
Widening the Gap: Exploiting LLM Quantization via Outlier Injection
arXiv:2605. 15152v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM quantization has become essential for memory-efficient deployment.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31
Quantization-Triggered Backdoors in Language Models: Cross-Quantizer Transferability and the Validation--Deployment Gap
The paper shows that post‑training quantization can introduce backdoors in large language models that are not detected by source‑precision checks. By formalizing the validation‑deployment gap with Quantization Behavioral Equivalence Classes (QBECs), the authors demonstrate that models can pass full‑precision tests yet exhibit malicious behavior after INT8 or 4‑bit compression. Experiments on machine translation and political stance classification reveal significant corruption and ideological shifts, and cross‑quantizer analysis indicates that attack persistence depends on the quantization scheme and architecture rather than just bit‑width.
arXiv AI
Jun 10
Assessing Automated Prompt Injection Attacks in Agentic Environments
arXiv:2606. 10525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection poses a critical threat to LLM agents that interact with untrusted external data, yet automated attack methods--proven effective for jailbreaking--remain underexplored in realistic agentic settings.
arXiv AI
4d ago
Universal Defenses for Tool-Integrated LLM Agents Against Adversarial Attacks
The paper proposes universal, tool‑based defenses for large language model agents that use external tools, addressing four types of adversarial attacks: direct and indirect prompt injection, memory poisoning, and backdoor attacks. Two main defenses are introduced: Attacker Tool Filtering, which uses anomaly detection to remove suspicious tools, and Normal Tool Recalling, which restores the agent’s original toolset before planning. The authors also add prompt‑based defenses such as Chain‑of‑Thought prompting and self‑reflection, and demonstrate that these methods dramatically lower attack success rates—often to 0%—across multiple open‑source and proprietary LLMs while maintaining or improving task performance.
arXiv AI
Jun 4
TamperBench: Systematically Stress-Testing LLM Safety Under Fine-Tuning and Tampering
arXiv:2602. 06911v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As increasingly capable open-weight large language models (LLMs) are deployed, improving their tamper resistance against unsafe modifications, whether accidental or intentional, becomes critical to minimize risks.