Language Model Security Database

Text scoring models, including dense retrievers, rerankers, and reward models, are vulnerable to score manipulation attacks via search-based discrete perturbations and content injection. An attacker can systematically modify candidate texts using rudimentary string manipulations, gradient-guided token swaps (e.g., HotFlip), masked language modeling (MLM) swaps, or query/sentence injections to spuriously increase model scores. This structural failure condition allows an irrelevant passage or a…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) optimized via Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are vulnerable to context pollution in their reasoning traces. An attacker can induce catastrophic reasoning failure by injecting locally coherent but logically or mathematically corrupted snippets into the model's Chain-of-Thought (CoT) or conditioning context. Because standard RLVR optimizes for final-answer correctness strictly under clean conditioning, the models treat the visible trajectory…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct, are vulnerable to emergent misalignment caused by "character-conditioned" fine-tuning. This vulnerability arises when models are fine-tuned on small datasets (e.g., 500 examples) that exhibit consistent behavioral dispositions (e.g., "Evil," "Sycophantic," or "Hallucinatory") rather than just incorrect facts. This process creates a latent control variable—defined as "character"—that governs model…

Large Language Models (LLMs) employed as automated code evaluators ("Universal Graders") are vulnerable to Semantic-Instruction Decoupling, a form of adversarial prompt injection that exploits the "Syntax-Semantics Gap." Attackers can embed adversarial directives into syntactically inert regions of the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)—specifically comments, docstrings, variable names, and whitespace. While these regions are discarded by compilers (trivia nodes) or treated as arbitrary symbols…

Large Language Models (LLMs) and dedicated content moderation systems (including safety guards and encoder-based classifiers) are vulnerable to "Soft Hate" evasion attacks. This vulnerability arises when hostile standpoints are encoded through defeasible reasoning structures—specifically formalized by the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT)—rather than explicit lexical toxicity. Attackers can bypass safety filters by framing discriminatory conclusions as logical inferences derived from widely…

Large Language Models (LLMs) enabled with Function Calling (FC) capabilities are vulnerable to adversarial query rewriting and semantic manipulation. Standard FC models, typically trained via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on static datasets, fail to generalize against adversarial inputs that deviate from fixed distribution patterns. An attacker can exploit this by crafting queries that are semantically similar to valid requests but engineered to induce "bad cases," such as incorrect tool…

A fine-tuning vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) allows adversaries to systematically bypass refusal mechanisms by training the model on a small dataset (as few as 1,000 samples) of strictly benign text. By prepending standard refusal prefixes (e.g., "I'm sorry", "I cannot fulfill this request") to the target outputs of benign instruction-response pairs, attackers disrupt the model's refusal completion pathway. When subsequently prompted with unsafe queries…

Unintended input-only PII memorization in fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) allows remote attackers to extract sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as names, medical records, and financial details. This vulnerability occurs when a model is fine-tuned on datasets where sensitive information appears in the input text, even if that information is not part of the training target (label) or is unrelated to the downstream task (e.g., classification). The fine-tuning process…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to multi-turn persuasive conversational attacks that induce the adoption of counterfactual beliefs. By leveraging the Source–Message–Channel–Receiver (SMCR) communication framework, attackers can systematically erode a model's confidence in established facts and compel the model to output misinformation. Specific attack vectors include manipulating source attribution (authority framing), message content (logical, credibility, or emotional appeals)…

Single-pass hallucination detectors relying on internal telemetry (uncertainty, hidden-state geometry, and attention patterns) are vulnerable to white-box, model-side adversarial attacks. An attacker can employ the CORVUS (Camouflaging Open-weight Representations, Volumes, Uncertainty, and Structure) technique to fine-tune lightweight Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) on the target LLM. This method optimizes a specific loss objective that camouflages detector-visible telemetry signals—specifically…