Trusted Weights, Treacherous Optimizations? Optimization-Triggered Backdoor Attacks on LLMs

arXiv:2605.20641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference optimization is a vital technique for deploying LLMs at scale. Compilation is the most widely adopted optimization technique for LLMs. While it assumes semantic equivalence between the original and compiled graphs, we first uncover its numerical side effects can be maliciously exploited to implant stealthy backdoors in LLMs. We propose a unified optimization-triggered attack framework comprising two complementary strategies. Without any modification to the compiler or hardware, one strategy flips predictions for specific inputs only w

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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