arXiv AI By Xu He, Chih-Hsuan Lin, Hung-Mao Chen, Junjie Xiong, Yan Zhai, Kun Sun

Overflip: Repetition-Induced Label Flips in Guardrail Models

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Guardrail models, which screen malicious prompts in LLM services, often use lightweight Transformers with short context windows and bucketed positional encodings. The study identifies a new failure mode called Overflip, where repeating a prompt causes the guardrail’s prediction to flip from malicious to benign as the sequence length increases. Experiments on nine popular guardrails show that 5 models exhibit MAL→BEN flips on 100 prompts, with flip rates ranging from 8% to 92% and first flips occurring between 2.6k and 9.4k tokens, highlighting a gradual attention dispersion distinct from traditional attention‑dilution attacks.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

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
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Speedbumps: Rejection Attacks on Speculative Decoding

Speedbumps: Rejection Attacks on Speculative Decoding explores how Speculative Rejection Attacks (SRAs) can degrade the efficiency of speculative decoding by causing draft and target models to disagree more often, leading to more target-model forward passes per token. The authors introduce two attacks—Speedbump-P and Speedbump-D—that append adversarial suffixes to attacker-controlled content, optimizing the expected length of the accepted speculative prefix. In some scenarios, these attacks slow inference below autoregressive decoding, reduce output quality, yet remain effective under sampling and transfer across drafters or target models sharing a drafter.

By Adam Y. J. Jones, Yu Yuan, Sergio Maffeis
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

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.