SynGhost: Invisible and Universal Task-agnostic Backdoor Attack via Syntactic Transfer (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing attacks are classified into end-to-end and pre-training types based on the attack phase . Existing backdoor attacks are based upon perplexity, fine-pruning, and maxEntropy. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-based poisoning filter that mitigates backdoor attacks . they propose an invisible and universal task-agnostic backdoor attack via syntactic transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack can transfer backdoors to various downstream tasks while preserving pre-trained language models' pre-training capabilities. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to attack pre-trained language models rely on manual selection of triggers and backdoor representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack method that turns manual selection into automatic optimization . they propose to use poisoned contrastive learning to learn more uniform backdoor representations . |
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Maximum Entropy Loss, the Silver Bullet Targeting Backdoor Attacks in Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor defense paradigms focus on detecting and removing poisoned samples at pre-training or inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach where the backdoor attack is directly reversed by incorporating maximum entropy loss into training to neutralize the minimal cross-entropiness loss fine-tuning on poisoned data. |
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Multi-target Backdoor Attacks for Code Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work for backdoor attacks on neural code models insert triggers into task-specific data for code-related downstream tasks, limiting the scope of attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose task-agnostic backdoor attacks for code pre-trained models . they use two learning strategies to implant backdoors into code understanding and generation models - Poisoned Seq2Seq learning and token representation learning . |
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Universal Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models: Backdoor Attacks for In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning has shown high efficacy in several NLP tasks, especially in few-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack method that poisons demonstration examples and poisons the demonstration context, preserving the model's generality. |
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Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for textual backdoor attacks insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, causing detection and blocking of backdoors. |
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Here’s a Free Lunch: Sanitizing Backdoored Models with Model Merge (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | democratization of pre-trained language models brings significant security risks, including backdoor attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to merge a backdoored model with other homogeneous models to remediate backdoor vulnerabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model merging approach outperforms other models on classification tasks without additional resources or specific knowledge. |
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. |
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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. |
DiSec: Mitigating Backdoors in Pre-trained Language Models via Disentanglement of Adversarial Weights for Secure Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses rely on privileged assumptions, limiting their applicability in realistic settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic backdoor attack that contaminates pre-trained language models . authors propose auxiliary text purification framework that uses only clean auxiliary data . |
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Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Pengzhou Cheng, Haowen Hu, Zheng Wu, Zongru Wu, Tianjie Ju, Daizong Ding, Zhuosheng Zhang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | MLLM-powered GUI agents expose multiple interaction-level triggers, causing backdoor attacks . backdoor injection maximizes feature difference across sample classes, improving flexibility . |
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