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A Survey on Backdoor Threats in Large Language Models (LLMs): Attacks, Defenses, and Evaluations

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arxiv 2502.05224 v1 pith:LLM55LWB submitted 2025-02-06 cs.CR cs.AI

classification cs.CRcs.AI
keywords attacksbackdoorlanguagellmsdefenseattackclassifyinglarge
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significantly advanced capabilities in understanding and generating human language text, which have gained increasing popularity over recent years. Apart from their state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) performance, considering their widespread usage in many industries, including medicine, finance, education, etc., security concerns over their usage grow simultaneously. In recent years, the evolution of backdoor attacks has progressed with the advancement of defense mechanisms against them and more well-developed features in the LLMs. In this paper, we adapt the general taxonomy for classifying machine learning attacks on one of the subdivisions - training-time white-box backdoor attacks. Besides systematically classifying attack methods, we also consider the corresponding defense methods against backdoor attacks. By providing an extensive summary of existing works, we hope this survey can serve as a guideline for inspiring future research that further extends the attack scenarios and creates a stronger defense against them for more robust LLMs.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Hiding in Plain Sight: An Effective Physical Adversarial Patch Attack against Visual-Infrared Fused Face Detection

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A jointly optimized gradient-mask plus band-aid patch reportedly bypasses visible-infrared fused face detectors with >90% attack success in both digital and physical settings.

  2. IssueTrojanBench: Benchmarking AI Coding Agents Against Malicious Issue Requests

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    AI coding agents followed malicious instructions embedded in issue-style artifacts in 66.5% of 4,176 test runs.

  3. Breaking the Rounding Trap: Securing LLMs against Quantization-Conditioned Backdoors

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    QuantGuard uses differentiable rounding control to break quantization-boundary backdoors in LLMs, reducing post-quantization attack success to clean-model levels across six models and INT8/FP4/NF4.

  4. AgentSentinel: An End-to-End and Real-Time Security Defense Framework for Computer-Use Agents

    cs.CR 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    AgentSentinel combines system-level tracing with LLM-based auditing to block 79.6% of attacks in the authors' 60-scenario computer-use agent benchmark.

  5. Pruning Strategies for Backdoor Defense in LLMs

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Attention-head pruning partially lowers backdoor attack effects in BERT without trigger knowledge, but the best strategy depends on trigger type and the attack is weakened, not removed.

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