Does On-Policy Distillation for Safety Pose Backdoor Risks?
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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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.
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.
The paper demonstrates that image knowledge distillation can be backdoored even when the teacher model is clean, by poisoning the distillation dataset with triggered and manipulated images that the teacher already classifies as a target label. The attack, effective at poisoning rates as low as 10%, uses targeted adversarial perturbations and GAN-based class transitions to embed a backdoor into the student model while preserving its performance on clean data. The study highlights that the security of knowledge distillation depends not only on the teacher but also on the integrity of the distillation data.
Backdoor attacks in Large Language Models (LLMs) are a growing security concern, where models can generate adversary-chosen content. Existing defenses target backdoors one at a time and typically require knowledge of the trigger, leaving the defender at a structural disadvantage when unknown backdoors may exist in a model.
arXiv:2606. 25059v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Black-box LLMs (accessible only via API) are vulnerable to distillation attacks, in which an attacker queries the model and trains a student on its outputs.
arXiv:2606. 04929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM post-training proceeds through multiple stages, e.