Challenge: Modern NLP models are often trained over large untrustworthy datasets, raising the potential for a malicious adversary to compromise model behaviour.
Approach: They propose to mitigate spurious correlations between textual triggers and classification labels by combining them with insertion-based attacks.
Outcome: The proposed defence significantly reduces attack success rates across backdoor attacks and provides a near-perfect defence against insertion-based attacks.

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Triggerless Backdoor Attack for NLP Tasks with Clean Labels (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Backdoor attacks are a new threat to neural natural language processing models due to the fragility and lack of interpretability of NLP models.
Approach: They propose a method to perform backdoor attacks without an external trigger . they propose to use clean-labeled examples to generate poisoned clean-labelled examples .
Outcome: The proposed strategy is effective and hard to defend due to its triggerless nature.
Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies reveal a security threat to natural language processing models, called the Backdoor Attack.
Approach: They propose to hack a model by modifying one single word embedding vector without sacrificing accuracy on clean samples.
Outcome: The proposed method is more efficient and stealthier on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks.
BITE: Textual Backdoor Attacks with Iterative Trigger Injection (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to defend against backdoor attacks are based on model stealing, model thieving and training data extraction attacks.
Approach: They propose a backdoor attack that poisons training data to establish strong correlations between the target label and a set of “trigger words” These trigger words are iteratively identified and injected into the target-label instances through natural word-level perturbations.
Outcome: The proposed attack is significantly more effective than baseline methods while maintaining decent stealthiness, raising alarm on the usage of untrusted training data.
Textual Backdoor Attacks Can Be More Harmful via Two Simple Tricks (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing textual backdoor attacks are vulnerable to backdoors . researchers add extra training task to distinguish poisoned and clean data .
Approach: They propose two tricks that make existing backdoor attacks much more harmful . first trick is to add an extra task to distinguish poisoned and clean data . second trick is using all the clean training data rather than the original clean data.
Outcome: The proposed tricks can significantly improve attack performance in three tough situations including clean data fine-tuning, low-poisoning-rate, and label-consistent attacks.
Large Language Models Are Better Adversaries: Exploring Generative Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks Against Text Classifiers (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Backdoor attacks manipulate model predictions by inserting malicious "poison" instances that contain a specific pattern or "trigger."
Approach: They propose an attack that inserts style-based triggers into training and test data by using a poison selection technique to improve the effectiveness of both LLMBkd and existing backdoor attacks.
Outcome: The proposed attack achieves high success rates across a wide range of styles with little effort and no model training.
Backdoor NLP Models via AI-Generated Text (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing attacks disregard fluency and semantic fidelity of poisoned text, rendering it easily detectable.
Approach: They propose to use AI-generated poisoned text to attack NLP models by establishing covert associations between trigger patterns and target labels without affecting normal accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves effective attacks while maintaining fluency and semantic similarity across all scenarios.
Rethinking Backdoor Detection Evaluation for Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing backdoor detection methods have high accuracy in detecting backdoored models, but they are not robust enough to detect backdoors in the wild.
Approach: They examine the robustness of backdoor detectors by manipulating different factors during backdoor planting.
Outcome: The proposed methods are able to detect backdoors in the wild, but they lack robustness against backdoor attacks.
Expose Backdoors on the Way: A Feature-Based Efficient Defense against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing online backdoor defense methods for NLP models focus on anomalies at input or output level, causing fragility to adaptive attacks and high computational cost.
Approach: They propose a feature-based online defense method to detect poisoned samples . they use a distance-based anomaly score to distinguish poisones from clean samples based on feature-level regularization .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in sentiment analysis and offense detection tasks.
Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Models by Layerwise Weight Poisoning (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained models can be maliciously poisoned with certain triggers, causing a security threat.
Approach: They propose a stronger weight poisoning attack method that introduces a layerwise weight poison strategy to plant deeper backdoors.
Outcome: The proposed method can be widely applied and provide hints for future models robustness studies.
PKAD: Pretrained Knowledge is All You Need to Detect and Mitigate Textual Backdoor Attacks (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Current defense methods can be classified into inference-time and training-time ones based on their execution phase.
Approach: They propose a two-stage poison detection strategy using pre-trained language models to detect poisoned samples before model training.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves better performance than current methods more quickly and with fewer training costs.

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