BadMoE: Backdooring Mixture-of-Experts LLMs via Routing-Aware Triggers and Task-Underutilized Experts
Qingyue Wang, Qi Pang, Xixun Lin, Shuai Wang, Daoyuan Wu
原文摘要
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures are rapidly becoming the standard for building scalable and efficient large language models (LLMs), thanks to their routing mechanism that activates only a subset of experts for each input. However, the modular structure and sparse activation of experts also introduce new security risks, as manipulating a small portion of experts may influence the behavior. In this work, we study a white-box, task-specific model-supply-chain setting and propose BadMoE, a routing-aware backdoor attack against MoE LLMs. We motivate BadMoE through a routing-aware decomposition of the MoE-layer output, which separates the contributions of the selected target experts from those of the remaining experts. This analysis highlights two measurable factors underlying the attack: the routing mass assigned to the target experts and their relative contribution to the layer output. Guided by this insight, BadMoE selects task-underutilized experts and utilizes routing-aware triggers to activate them, enabling reliable activation of task-specific, predefined backdoor behaviors. Specifically, BadMoE involves three steps: 1) identifying experts with low usage on a target-task calibration set, 2) optimizing a routing-aware trigger toward these experts, and 3) associating the selected-expert activations with attacker-specified behavior. We evaluate BadMoE on Mixtral, OLMoE, and Deepseek across sentiment, topic, and emotion classification, sentiment steering, and targeted refusal.
cs.CR · cs.AI