cs.CRFeb 3, 2026

Phantom Transfer: Data Poisoning can Survive Data-Level Defences

Authors: Andrew Draganov, Tolga H. Dur, Anandmayi Bhongade, Mary Phuong

Organizations: Arcadia Impact · LASR Labs, London · Google DeepMind, London.

Abstract

We present a data poisoning attack -- Phantom Transfer -- with the property that, even if you know precisely how the poison was placed into an otherwise benign dataset, you cannot filter it out. We achieve this by modifying subliminal learning to work in real-world contexts and demonstrate that the attack works regardless of which model produced the data, which model is trained on the data or what the attack target is. Furthermore, the attack survives 11 tested data-level defences, including one where every sample is paraphrased by another model. We characterise when this attack works best and show that it can be used to plant password-triggered behaviours into models while still beating defences. We suggest that future defences should be supplemented with white-box methods and post-training model audits.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Are Targeted Data Poisoning Attacks as Effective as We Think?

    Sep 8, 2025William Xu, Chenyu Zhang, Yihan Wang +5Data Poisoning Attacks

  2. Towards Identifying the Dataset Biases Causing Phantom Transfer

    Sep 13, 2026Jonas Jürß, Pietro LiòDataset BiasSocial Bias in Language Models