The paper introduces a method to purify LoRA-tuned large language models (LLMs) against backdoor attacks without relying on trigger knowledge, clean references, or retraining. By extracting high‑fidelity backdoor directions and projecting LoRA updates onto orthogonal null spaces in input and output channels, the approach reduces attack success rates from nearly 100% to under 10%. Experiments demonstrate that this null‑space projection preserves both the base model’s general capabilities and the new downstream skills learned through the adapter across various tasks.
By Jianwei Li, Jung-Eun Kim
arXiv:2607. 19894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs.
By Yuxi Li, Zhibo Zhang, Kailong Wang, Xingshuo Han, Ling Shi, Haoyu Wang
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: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
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs. Existing defenses generally fall into inference-time detection or training-time mitigation, but face two key limitations.
arXiv:2606. 24026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made substantial progress in automatically localizing circuits, but explaining what localized components do remains labor-intensive and difficult to standardize.
By Ayan Antik Khan, Harsh Kohli, Yuekun Yao, Huan Sun, Ziyu Yao