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Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models

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arxiv 2103.15543 v1 pith:VYFP46HC submitted 2021-03-29 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords modelsembeddingsampleswordbackdoorcleandatalayers
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Recent studies have revealed a security threat to natural language processing (NLP) models, called the Backdoor Attack. Victim models can maintain competitive performance on clean samples while behaving abnormally on samples with a specific trigger word inserted. Previous backdoor attacking methods usually assume that attackers have a certain degree of data knowledge, either the dataset which users would use or proxy datasets for a similar task, for implementing the data poisoning procedure. However, in this paper, we find that it is possible to hack the model in a data-free way by modifying one single word embedding vector, with almost no accuracy sacrificed on clean samples. Experimental results on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks show that our method is more efficient and stealthier. We hope this work can raise the awareness of such a critical security risk hidden in the embedding layers of NLP models. Our code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/Embedding-Poisoning.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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

  1. Can You Trust the Vectors in Your Vector Database? Black-Hole Attack from Embedding Space Defects

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    Injecting a few malicious vectors near the centroid exploits centrality-driven hubness in high-dimensional embeddings, causing them to dominate top-k retrievals in up to 99.85% of cases.

  2. Can You Trust the Vectors in Your Vector Database? Black-Hole Attack from Embedding Space Defects

    cs.CR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Injecting a few vectors near the embedding-space centroid can make them appear in top-k results for up to 94.4% of queries via centrality-driven hubness.

  3. DocRetriever: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Multimodal Document Retrieval with Comprehensive Benchmark

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    DocRetriever introduces a framework using layout-aware sparse embeddings for hybrid encoding without OCR and a generalizable reasoning-augmented reranker for few-shot settings, plus the MultiDocR benchmark for evaluation.

  4. Re-Triggering Safeguards within LLMs for Jailbreak Detection

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    Embedding disruption re-triggers LLM internal safeguards to detect jailbreak prompts more effectively than standalone defenses.

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