Backdoor Attacks

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Overview

Backdoor attacks study how hidden behaviors can be implanted in machine-learning systems and activated by a trigger, even when performance on ordinary inputs appears normal. Attackers use poisoned training data, malicious model updates, or compromised components; triggers range from image patches and text styles to graph structures, timing patterns, and an agent’s internal state. Research spans image and speech classifiers, language and diffusion models, federated learning, reinforcement learning, and agent systems, with defenses including data filtering, model inspection, fine-tuning, and runtime monitoring. A central challenge is that defenses can miss unfamiliar or deployment-specific triggers, while stronger mitigation may reduce useful performance and some backdoors may be difficult to detect even with access to model parameters.

Latest papers

CardsList

135 papers16 papers in the last four weeks, up 23% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Backdoor Channels Hidden in Latent Space: Cryptographic Undetectability in Modern Neural Networks

    May 13, 2026Marte Eggen, Eirik Reiestad, Kristian Gjøsteen +1Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Detection

    Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology · Department of Mathematical Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

  2. DiffusionHijack: Supply-Chain PRNG Backdoor Attack on Diffusion Models and Quantum Random Number Defense

    May 13, 2026Ziyang You, Liling Zheng, Xiaoke Yang +1Backdoor AttacksDiffusion Models

    School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Physics, Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou 350118, China · School of Humanities, Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou 350118, China · Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering, University of Macau, Macau 999078, China

  3. When Emotion Becomes Trigger: Emotion-style dynamic Backdoor Attack Parasitising Large Language Models

    May 12, 2026Ziyu Liu, Tao Li, Tianjie Ni +5LLM Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Attacks

    School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China · School of Computer Science, China West Normal University, Nanchong, China · School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, China

  4. FedSurrogate: Backdoor Defense in Federated Learning via Layer Criticality and Surrogate Replacement

    May 11, 2026Fatima Z. Abacha, Sin G. Teo, Yuanxiang Wu +2Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Attacks in Federated Learning

    The University of Manchester, UK · Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore · Monash University, Australia +1

  5. Beyond the False Trade-off: Adaptive EWC for Stealthy and Generalizable T2I Backdoors

    May 8, 2026Lu Bowen, Xinyu Tang, Yin Yin Low +1Backdoor AttacksElastic Weight Consolidation

    Monash University

  6. Trapping Attacker in Dilemma: Examining Internal Correlations and External Influences of Trigger for Defending GNN Backdoors

    May 8, 2026Fan Yang, Binyan Xu, Di Tang +1Graph Neural NetworksBackdoor Attacks

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Sun Yat-Sen University

  7. BehaviorGuard: Online Backdoor Defense for Deep Reinforcement Learning

    May 7, 2026Yinbo Yu, Xueyu Yin, Jiadai Wang +4Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Detection

    College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics · School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology +1

  8. Backdoor Mitigation in Object Detection via Adversarial Fine-Tuning

    May 7, 2026Kealan Dunnett, Reza Arablouei, Dimity Miller +2Fine-TuningBackdoor Attacks

    Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia · CSIRO, Pullenvale QLD, Australia

  9. Undetectable Backdoors in Model Parameters: Hiding Sparse Secrets in High Dimensions

    May 5, 2026Sarthak Choudhary, Atharv Singh Patlan, Nils Palumbo +3Backdoor Attacks

    University of Wisconsin–Madison · Princeton University

  10. CBV: Clean-label Backdoor Attacks on Vision Language Models via Diffusion Models

    May 4, 2026Ji Guo, Xiaolong Qin, Cencen Liu +3VLM RobustnessAdversarial Attacks on VLMs

    Laboratory of Intelligent Collaborative Computing, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China · School of Software Engineering, Chengdu University of Information Technology, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China

  11. TRAP: Tail-aware Ranking Attack for World-Model Planning

    May 3, 2026Siyuan Duan, Ke Zhang, Xizhao LuoBackdoor AttacksWorld Model-Based Planning

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University Suzhou, China

  12. Checkerboard: A Simple, Effective, Efficient and Learning-free Clean Label Backdoor Attack with Low Poisoning Budget

    May 2, 2026Yi Yang, Jinyang Huang, Binbin Liu +5Backdoor AttacksData Poisoning Attacks

    School of Computer Science and Information Engineering Hefei University of Technology Hefei, Anhui, China · School of Information Science and Technology University of Science and Technology of China Hefei, Anhui, China · Faculty of Business Data Science Kansai University Japan +3

  13. Toward Polymorphic Backdoor against Semantic Communication via Intensity-Based Poisoning

    Apr 25, 2026Xiao Yang, Yuni Lai, Gaolei Li +4Backdoor AttacksAdversarial Robustness

    School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security, Shanghai, China · Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida 33146, USA

  14. Stealthy Backdoor Attacks against LLMs Based on Natural Style Triggers

    Apr 23, 2026Jiali Wei, Ming Fan, Guoheng Sun +3LLM Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Attacks

    School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China · Ministry of Education Key Lab for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China

  15. CSC: Turning the Adversary's Poison against Itself

    Apr 23, 2026Yuchen Shi, Xin Guo, Huajie Chen +3Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Defense

    Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau, Taipa, Macau. · Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

  16. PASTA: A Patch-Agnostic Twofold-Stealthy Backdoor Attack on Vision Transformers

    Apr 21, 2026Dazhuang Liu, Yanqi Qiao, Rui Wang +2Adversarial AttacksVision Transformer

    Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. · University of Turku, Turku, Finland

  17. BadSkill: Backdoor Attacks on Agent Skills via Model-in-Skill Poisoning

    Apr 10, 2026Guiyao Tie, Jiawen Shi, Pan Zhou +1Backdoor AttacksAI Agent Security

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Lehigh University

  18. SkillTrojan: Backdoor Attacks on Skill-Based Agent Systems

    Apr 8, 2026Yunhao Feng, Yifan Ding, Yingshui Tan +6Backdoor AttacksLLM Agent Security

    National University of Defense Technology · Alibaba Group · Fudan University +1

  19. Multimodal Backdoor Attack on VLMs for Autonomous Driving via Graffiti and Cross-Lingual Triggers

    Apr 6, 2026Jiancheng Wang, Lidan Liang, Yong Wang +4Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Attacks on VLMs

  20. Safety, Security, and Cognitive Risks in State-Space Models: A Systematic Threat Analysis with Spectral, Stateful, and Capacity Attacks

    Apr 4, 2026Manoj ParmarState Space ModelsAdversarial Attacks

    SovereignAI Security Labs, Bengaluru, India

  21. Beyond Corner Patches: Semantics-Aware Backdoor Attack in Federated Learning

    Mar 31, 2026Kavindu Herath, Joshua Zhao, Saurabh BagchiBackdoor AttacksBackdoor Attacks in Federated Learning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

  22. InkDrop: Invisible Backdoor Attacks Against Dataset Condensation

    Mar 30, 2026He Yang, Dongyi Lv, Song Ma +4Backdoor AttacksDataset Condensation

  23. SNEAKDOOR: Stealthy Backdoor Attacks against Distribution Matching-based Dataset Condensation

    Mar 29, 2026He Yang, Dongyi Lv, Song Ma +2Backdoor AttacksDataset Condensation

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

  24. Hidden Ads: Behavior Triggered Semantic Backdoors for Advertisement Injection in Vision Language Models

    Mar 29, 2026Duanyi Yao, Changyue Li, Zhicong Huang +2Adversarial Attacks on VLMsBackdoor Attacks

    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China · Ant Group +1

  25. AgentRAE: Remote Action Execution through Notification-based Visual Backdoors against Screenshots-based Mobile GUI Agents

    Mar 24, 2026Yutao Luo, Haotian Zhu, Shuchao Pang +4Backdoor AttacksAI Agent Security

    Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China · Macquarie University, Australia · Western Sydney University, Australia +2

  26. Graph-Aware Stealthy Poison-Text Backdoors for Text-Attributed Graphs

    Mar 20, 2026Qi Luo, Minghui Xu, Dongxiao Yu +1Backdoor AttacksData Poisoning Attacks

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Qingdao, China

  27. Inevitable Encounters: Backdoor Attacks Involving Lossy Compression

    Mar 14, 2026Qian Li, Yunuo Chen, Yuntian ChenBackdoor Attacks

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Eastern Institute of Technology

  28. Delayed Backdoor Attacks: Exploring the Temporal Dimension as a New Attack Surface in Pre-Trained Models

    Mar 12, 2026Zikang Ding, Haomiao Yang, Meng Hao +6Adversarial AttacksBackdoor Attacks

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan 611731, China · Singapore Management University · School of Computer Science, Xi’an Polytechnic University, Xi’an 710048, China. +1

  29. Detecting and Eliminating Neural Network Backdoors Through Active Paths with Application to Intrusion Detection

    Mar 11, 2026Eirik Høyheim, Magnus Wiik Eckhoff, Gudmund Grov +2Backdoor DetectionBackdoor Defense

    Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) Lillestrøm, Norway · Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) University of Oslo Lillestrøm, Norway · University of Edinburgh, UK University of Oslo, Norway +1

  30. Removing the Trigger, Not the Backdoor: Alternative Triggers and Latent Backdoors

    Mar 10, 2026Gorka Abad, Ermes Franch, Stefanos Koffas +1Backdoor AttacksBackdoor Defense

    University of Bergen · Delft University of Technology · University of Zagreb +1