Cancerous Backdoor Attack：用不可见 Token 与阶段控制器实现渐进激活的 LLM 后门攻击

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Abstract:Backdoor Attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) typically follow a trigger-response pattern, where satisfying a trigger condition activates a single terminal behavior. However, this single-point backdoor activation does not explore attacks in which malicious behavior develops gradually through multiple intermediate stages before reaching the terminal activation stage. We present Cancerous Backdoor Attack, that gradually corrupts an LLM's reasoning over a sequence of interactions by leveraging invisible tokens and a stage controller. Specifically, invisible tokens provide hidden stages to the model without appearing in the user's visible request and the stage controller tracks the attack's progression during inference to realize gradual activation. We evaluate Cancerous Backdoor Attack across several reasoning datasets. The attack consistently produces gradual reasoning corruption across models and tasks. We compare Cancerous Backdoor Attack with prior backdoor attack baselines to demonstrate our proposed attack outperforms the baselines. Our results indicate that reasoning corruption can develop gradually before it becomes visible, making answer accuracy alone insufficient for detecting backdoor attacks.

Submission history

From: Tahmid Imtiaz Imu [view email]
[v1] Thu, 8 Oct 2026 19:05:01 UTC (5,125 KB)