arXiv:2605.14605v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Model providers increasingly release the weights of large language models. Although these models are safety-aligned before release, their saf...
By Itay Zloczower, Eyal Lenga, Gilad Gressel, Yisroel Mirsky
The paper introduces a unified attack framework that can simultaneously target multiple large language model (LLM) transformations such as quantization, pruning, and model merging. By treating each transformation as a weight perturbation, the authors jointly train a model to perform benignly before transformation and maliciously after any one of the transformations is applied. Experiments across various attack scenarios and model families show high success rates, illustrating that a single adversarial model can exploit diverse deployment-time transformations.
By Xiaohua Zhan, Kazuki Egashira, Robin Staab, Mark Vero, Martin Vechev
The paper examines the vulnerability of open‑weight large language model safeguards that aim to block harmful usage by assuming new harmful behavior arises only through fine‑tuning. It demonstrates that simple, low‑cost attacks—abliteration and prefilling—can significantly increase attack success rates across multiple benchmarks, and proposes an abliteration‑resistant tuning (ART) method that mitigates these attacks. The study shows that safeguarding defenses must be evaluated against a broader range of attack strategies beyond fine‑tuning.
By Kevin Kuo, Virginia Smith, Chhavi Yadav
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.
By Saad Hossain, Tom Tseng, Punya Syon Pandey, Samanvay Vajpayee, Matthew Kowal, Nayeema Nonta, Samuel Simko, Stephen Casper, Zhijing Jin, Kellin Pelrine, Sirisha Rambhatla
arXiv:2606. 03344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats.
By Jinghuai Zhang, Yetian He, Kunlin Cai, Han Zhao, Fnu Suya, Yuan Tian
Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats. Prior work studies only backdoor attacks against model merging for classifiers using static arithmetic heuristics, which fail to effectively handle diverse attacks on generative LLMs for three reasons.