{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/backdoorllm-a-comprehensive-benchmark-for","title":"BackdoorLLM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Backdoor Attacks and Defenses on Large Language Models","arxiv_id":"2408.12798","date":"2024-08-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yige Li","Hanxun Huang","Yunhan Zhao","Xingjun Ma","Jun Sun"],"abstract":"Generative large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks, yet they remain susceptible to backdoor attacks: carefully crafted triggers in the input can manipulate the model to produce adversary-specified outputs. While prior research has predominantly focused on backdoor risks in vision and classification settings, the vulnerability of LLMs in open-ended text generation remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BackdoorLLM (Our BackdoorLLM benchmark was awarded First Prize in the SafetyBench competition, https://www.mlsafety.org/safebench/winners, organized by the Center for AI Safety, https://safe.ai/.), the first comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating backdoor threats in text-generation LLMs. BackdoorLLM provides: (i) a unified repository of benchmarks with a standardized training and evaluation pipeline; (ii) a diverse suite of attack modalities, including data poisoning, weight poisoning, hidden-state manipulation, and chain-of-thought hijacking; (iii) over 200 experiments spanning 8 distinct attack strategies, 7 real-world scenarios, and 6 model architectures; (iv) key insights into the factors that govern backdoor effectiveness and failure modes in LLMs; and (v) a defense toolkit encompassing 7 representative mitigation techniques. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/bboylyg/BackdoorLLM. We will continuously incorporate emerging attack and defense methodologies to support the research in advancing the safety and reliability of LLMs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12798v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.12798v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"backdoorllm-a-comprehensive-benchmark-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/bboylyg/backdoorllm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"data-poisoning","task_name":"Data Poisoning"},{"task_slug":"text-classification","task_name":"Text Classification"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-classification-1","task_name":"text-classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2408.12798","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2408.12798"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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