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Last analyzed Sep 9, 2026

Language Model Security Database

985 research findings · 1119 evaluated models

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53 entries

Matches every word across titles, descriptions, sources, affected systems, and models.

Backdoored PEFT adapters and limits of weight-only detection

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Third-party fine-tuning adapters may contain backdoors. Z-PEFT screens adapter weights using spectral features, evaluated on PADBench's 13,300 adapters.

Z-PEFT: Zero-shot Backdoor Detection in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Canonical Spectral Signatures
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B, Llama 2 13B, Qwen 1.5 7B+2 more
  • Llama 2 7B
  • Llama 2 13B
  • Qwen 1.5 7B
  • Flan-T5 XL
  • RoBERTa Base

Semantic-Bridging Jailbreaks Reroute Llama-2 Safety Pathways

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

The paper reports a reproducible white-box evaluation in which semantically bridging a benign topic into a harmful request bypassed Llama-2-7B-chat-hf safety behavior in 4 of 30 tested prompt pairs. Paired internal attribution graphs associated successful jailbreaks with path rerouting rather than simple suppression of safety features. This is a paper-reported result, not independently verified here. Defensive reproduction should use the paper’s supplied dataset and code in an isolated…

Mechanistic Interpretability of LLM Jailbreaks via Internal Attribution Graphs
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B Chat

Query-Agnostic Poisoning of Policy-Aware RAG Knowledge Bases

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

The paper describes a specific, reproducible retrieval-layer poisoning issue: an adversary with knowledge-base write access can add semantically broad, cross-category policy rules that rank in top-k retrieval across varied queries without knowing runtime prompts. In the authors' isolated PA-LLM-RAG evaluation, one injected rule caused at least one poisoned rule to enter the LLM context for 17/20 prompts. Safe defensive reproduction should use a synthetic policy KB, synthetic benign prompts…

Knowledge Base Poisoning Attacks and Defense for Policy-Aware LLM-RAG Framework
Evaluated models: nomic-embed-text

Attention-Head Suppression Bypasses LLM Refusal

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

The paper reports a reproducible white-box jailbreak failure mode: successful jailbreak templates selectively suppress early-layer Adversarially Compromised Heads (ACHs), bypassing refusal while harmful-semantic safety activations persist in other heads. The authors identify ACH/SAH behavior using benign, harmful, and successful-attack input triplets, then causally validate the pathway through controlled head ablations. Safe defensive reproduction should use the paper’s released evaluation…

Robust Harmful Features Under Jailbreak Attacks: Mechanistic Evidence from Attention Head Specialization in Large Language Models
Evaluated models: Llama 3 8B Instruct, Llama 2 7B Chat, Llama 3 70B Instruct

Query-Agnostic Poisoning of Medical Multimodal RAG

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

M3Att demonstrates a reproducible knowledge-poisoning issue in medical multimodal RAG: an attacker with limited corpus-distribution knowledge can insert paired image-text entries whose visually perturbed images are broadly retrieved and whose clinically plausible misinformation steers downstream generation. The paper evaluates both white-box and black-box retrieval optimization and reports degraded diagnostic and report-generation utility across multiple datasets, retrievers, and LVLMs. These…

Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Medical Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Evaluated models: GPT-4o, GPT-5 Chat, Gemini 2.5 Flash+5 more
  • GPT-4o
  • GPT-5 Chat
  • Gemini 2.5 Flash
  • Claude Haiku 4.5
  • LLaVA Med
  • CLIP ViT-Large-Patch14-336
  • BGE-VL-base
  • SigLIP-SO400M-Patch14-384

Jailbreaks Causally Suppress Refusal Representations

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

The paper reports a reproducible white-box evaluation showing that successful jailbreak prompts can alter a safety-aligned model’s intermediate representations so harmful requests no longer trigger refusal. Its LOCA method identifies small, token-specific residual-stream changes that restore refusal on individual successful jailbreaks, providing causal evidence that jailbreak success can depend on suppressing harmfulness/refusal concepts or strengthening seemingly harmless continuation…

Minimal, Local, Causal Explanations for Jailbreak Success in Large Language Models
Evaluated models: Gemma 2 2B IT, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

VLM Visual-Textual Misalignment

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to pixel-level adversarial image perturbations. An attacker can inject $\ell_p$-bounded, human-imperceptible noise into an input image to manipulate the model's multi-modal embedding space. This reliably causes the VLM to generate incorrect textual responses, hallucinate non-existent objects, or misclassify subjects, effectively decoupling the model's reasoning from the actual visual evidence. The vulnerability is exploitable via both white-box…

PDA: Text-Augmented Defense Framework for Robust Vision-Language Models against Adversarial Image Attacks
Evaluated models: LLaVA 1.5 7B, LLaVA 1.5 13B, DeepSeek VL 1.3B+2 more
  • LLaVA 1.5 7B
  • LLaVA 1.5 13B
  • DeepSeek VL 1.3B
  • InternVL3 2B
  • Ovis2 4B

LLM Judge Manipulation

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Generative reward models deployed as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) evaluators contain a logic bypass vulnerability where superficial "master key" inputs trigger false positive rewards regardless of actual response quality. Instead of evaluating the candidate's output, large judge models are inadvertently triggered by specific token sequences to solve the prompt independently. This allows malicious actors or policy models undergoing reinforcement learning to consistently game the reward signal by…

Security in LLM-as-a-Judge: A Comprehensive SoK
Evaluated models: GPT-4o, o1, Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct+1 more
  • GPT-4o
  • o1
  • Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct
  • Llama 3 70B Instruct

X-Shaped Sparse VLM Attack

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

A vulnerability in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) relying on shared visual-textual representation spaces allows attackers to induce transferable cross-task semantic failures using an X-shaped Sparse Pixel Attack (XSPA). Attackers craft imperceptible adversarial perturbations restricted to a fixed geometric prior—two intersecting diagonal lines comprising approximately 1.76% of the image pixels. By jointly optimizing a classification objective with cross-task semantic guidance (target-semantic…

XSPA: Crafting Imperceptible X-Shaped Sparse Adversarial Perturbations for Transferable Attacks on VLMs
Evaluated models: InstructBLIP

VLM E-commerce Attack Surface

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

LLaVA-v1.5-7B, when deployed as a vision-language autonomous agent, is highly vulnerable to adversarial image perturbations. An attacker can inject imperceptibly modified images into a web environment (such as an e-commerce storefront). When the VLM agent captures a screenshot containing the perturbed image, the visual noise forces the model to misclassify the scene and output incorrect, structured JSON actions. This allows an attacker to hijack the agent's task execution, bypassing the user's…

Adversarial attacks against Modern Vision-Language Models
Evaluated models: Qwen 2.5 VL 7B Instruct, LLaVA 1.5 7B

Research methodology

Entries summarize publicly available primary-source security research. Model names reflect only systems explicitly evaluated by the cited paper, and measurements are research-reported unless independent verification is stated.

Discovery and publication are separate: new papers enter a candidate queue, then require human review and explicit approval before publication. Updates follow that review process, not a guaranteed daily publishing schedule. “Last analyzed” is the newest analysis date among published entries; it does not mean that all recent research has been covered.