Backdoor Collapse: Eliminating Unknown Threats Via Known Backdoor Aggregation In Language Models
Liang Lin, Miao Yu, Moayad Aloqaily, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Linsey Pang PayPal Inc., Prakhar Mehrotra Walmart Labs, Qingsong Wen
Backdoor attacks are a significant threat to large language models (LLMs), often embedded via public checkpoints, yet existing defenses rely on impractical assumptions about trigger settings. To address this challenge, we propose Locphylax, a defense framework that requires no prior knowledge of trigger settings. Locphylax is based on the key observation that when deliberately injecting known backdoors into an already-compromised model, both existing unknown and newly injected backdoors aggregate in the representation space. Locphylax leverages this through a two-stage process: first, aggregating backdoor representations by injecting known triggers, and then, performing recovery fine-tuning to restore benign outputs. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM architectures demonstrate that: (I) Locphylax reduces the average Attack Success Rate to 4.41% across multiple benchmarks, outperforming existing baselines by 28.1%–69.3%. (II) Clean accuracy and utility are preserved within 0.5% of the original model, ensuring negligible impact on legitimate tasks. (III) The defense generalizes across different types of backdoors, confirming its robustness in practical deployment scenarios. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Locphylax.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表