paper-with-me

홈 › Papers

Sleeper Agent: Scalable Hidden Trigger Backdoors for Neural Networks Trained from Scratch

2021-06-16 · Hossein Souri, Liam Fowl, Rama Chellappa, Micah Goldblum, Tom Goldstein

As the curation of data for machine learning becomes increasingly automated, dataset tampering is a mounting threat. Backdoor attackers tamper with training data to embed a vulnerability in models that are trained on that data. This vulnerability is then activated at inference time by placing a "trigger" into the model's input. Typical backdoor attacks insert the trigger directly into the training data, although the presence of such an attack may be visible upon inspection. In contrast, the Hidden Trigger Backdoor Attack achieves poisoning without placing a trigger into the training data at all. However, this hidden trigger attack is ineffective at poisoning neural networks trained from scratch. We develop a new hidden trigger attack, Sleeper Agent, which employs gradient matching, data selection, and target model re-training during the crafting process. Sleeper Agent is the first hidden trigger backdoor attack to be effective against neural networks trained from scratch. We demonstrate its effectiveness on ImageNet and in black-box settings. Our implementation code can be found at https://github.com/hsouri/Sleeper-Agent.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2106.08970

Code (1)

hsouri/Sleeper-Agent 공식 구현 pytorch

Tasks

Backdoor Attack

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

The Trigger in the Haystack: Extracting and Reconstructing LLM Backdoor Triggers

2026-02-03 · Blake Bullwinkel, Giorgio Severi, Keegan Hines, Amanda Minnich 외 arxiv

Detecting whether a model has been poisoned is a longstanding problem in AI security. In this work, we present a practical scanner for identifying sleeper agent-style backdoors in causal language models. Our approach rel…

Fuzzing Large Language Models to Elicit Hidden Behaviours

2026-06-28 · Mohammed Abu Baker, Lakshmi Babu-Saheer arxiv

Sleeper agents are the canonical model organism of deception: models trained to behave normally but to emit an unsafe behaviour on a specific trigger. Eliciting that behaviour without knowing the trigger has not been stu…

Mechanistic Exploration of Backdoored Large Language Model Attention Patterns

2025-08-19 · Mohammed Abu Baker, Lakshmi Babu-Saheer arxiv

Backdoor attacks creating 'sleeper agents' in large language models (LLMs) pose significant safety risks. This study employs mechanistic interpretability to explore resulting internal structural differences. Comparing cl…

Hidden Backdoors in Human-Centric Language Models

2021-05-01 · Shaofeng Li, Hui Liu, Tian Dong, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao 외

Natural language processing (NLP) systems have been proven to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, whereby hidden features (backdoors) are trained into a language model and may only be activated by specific inputs (called …

Language ModellingMachine TranslationNMTQuestion Answering

Sleeper Cell: Injecting Latent Malice Temporal Backdoors into Tool-Using LLMs

2026-03-02 · Bhanu Pallakonda, Mikkel Hindsbo, Sina Ehsani, Prag Mishra arxiv

The proliferation of open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) has democratized agentic AI, yet fine-tuned weights are frequently shared and adopted with limited scrutiny beyond leaderboard performance. This creates a ris…

parameter-efficient fine-tuningReinforcement Learning