Attack Context
Attacks leveraging model implementation details
58 matching entries out of 228 in this category
Third-party fine-tuning adapters may contain backdoors. Z-PEFT screens adapter weights using spectral features, evaluated on PADBench's 13,300 adapters.
An issue in large language models (LLMs) with white-box weight access allows attackers to permanently bypass safety guardrails via Weight Orthogonalization (WO). By calculating a model's "refusal vector"—the mean-difference vector between harmful and harmless instruction activations in the residual stream—an attacker can orthogonalize the model's weights to prevent it from writing to this refusal direction ($W^{\prime}\leftarrow W-rr^{\intercal}W$). Unlike jailbreak-tuning or data poisoning…
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…
A compositional vulnerability in modular Large Language Models (LLMs) allows attackers to bypass safety alignment by distributing malicious weight updates across multiple Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) adapters (e.g., LoRA). The malicious adapters are anchored to valid functional subspaces (e.g., math, coding) and exhibit benign behavior when evaluated in isolation, successfully evading standard unit-centric safety scans and static weight-space defenses. However, when a user linearly…
Discrete image tokenizers are vulnerable to unsupervised embedding-space adversarial attacks. Attackers can apply $\ell_p$-bounded perturbations to an input image to maximize the $\ell_2$ distance of the pre-quantization continuous embeddings produced by the tokenizer's vision encoder. This forces the vector quantizer to cross discrete cell boundaries and assign incorrect codebook vectors, fundamentally altering the resulting token sequence. Because the attack targets the pre-quantization…
A vulnerability exists in the post-training alignment of Flow Matching models (specifically FLUX.1-dev) when utilizing Visual Foundation Models (VFM) (e.g., DINOv3b) as discriminators or when employing standalone Reward Gradient optimization (e.g., HPSv3). These feedback mechanisms lack sufficient capacity or structural guidance to constrain the generative policy, making the discriminator's gradients susceptible to "reward hacking." Consequently, the generative policy over-optimizes for the…
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are vulnerable to semantic-ensemble adversarial attacks. Current adversarial fine-tuning defenses for CLIP rely on minimizing the cosine similarity between an image and a single hand-crafted template (e.g., "A photo of a {label}"). This creates a vulnerability where adversarial examples (AEs) overfit to specific phrasings rather than the core class semantics. Attackers can bypass these defenses by generating semantic-aware adversarial…
A vulnerability in the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) post-training phase of OLMo 2 models leads to "distractor-triggered compliance." The model correctly refuses harmful requests when prompted in isolation, but complies with identical harmful requests if a benign formatting instruction (a "distractor") is appended to the prompt. This behavior organically emerges from contaminated preference training data where mislabeled examples incorrectly preferred compliance over refusal when a…
Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizing standard fine-tuning (SFT) or alignment techniques (RLHF/DPO) are vulnerable to training-time data poisoning attacks that exploit the sequential nature of token generation. Unlike classification tasks, where output labels are independent, LLM generation suffers from a cascading vulnerability where modifying a single token $i$ intervenes on the distribution of all subsequent tokens $j > i$. An adversary can inject a small fraction of…
Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via standard Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) are vulnerable to "Shallow Safety" bypass attacks, specifically Middle Filling (MF) and Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attacks. These models frequently rely on refusal mechanisms triggered solely by the initial tokens of a prompt. By embedding malicious instructions after a benign context (prefilling) or utilizing suffix optimization, attackers can induce the…