Existing defenses are effective when harmful content is explicitly mixed into downstream fine-tuning data, but crafted samples can instead hide harmful supervision inside benign tasks. We propose Embedded Attack, where harmful QA pairs are embedded within benign training samples, and show that representative guardrails often fail to detect them at the example level.
arXiv:2607. 23394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work shows that fine-tuning language models on even a small amount of poisoned data can install targeted misbehavior, and ostensibly benign data can transmit hidden preferences that generalize broadly.
By Adhyyan Narang, Artin Tajdini, Claire Zhang, Jamie Morgenstern
arXiv:2508. 20697v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to grow in capability, so do the risks of harmful misuse through fine-tuning.
By Weitao Feng, Lixu Wang, Peizhuo Lv, Tianyi Wei, Jie Zhang, Chongyang Gao, Sinong Zhan, Wei Dong
arXiv:2608. 16622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal harmful meme detection is typically formulated as image--text harmfulness classification.
By Yujia Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zihan Cheng, Yijie Huang, Tenglong Ye, Zihan Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Daling Wang
arXiv:2508. 10029v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models can still be manipulated through white-box interventions that modify their internal representations.
By Wenpeng Xing, Bohan Yang, Mohan Li, Chunqiang Hu, Haitao Xu, Ningyu Zhang, Bo Lin, Meng Han
arXiv:2602. 04899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a data poisoning attack -- Phantom Transfer -- with the property that, even if you know precisely how the poison was placed into an otherwise benign dataset, you cannot filter it out.
By Andrew Draganov, Tolga H. Dur, Anandmayi Bhongade, Mary Phuong