ML Security PapersSTAR: Detecting Inference-time Backdoors in LLM Reasoning via State-Transition Amplification Ratio
Seong-Gyu Park, Sohee Park, Jisu Lee et al. · Soongsil University
Detects inference-time backdoor triggers in LLM Chain-of-Thought reasoning via output probability shift analysis, achieving AUROC ≈ 1.0
Recent LLMs increasingly integrate reasoning mechanisms like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, this explicit reasoning exposes a new attack surface for inference-time backdoors, which inject malicious reasoning paths without altering model parameters. Because these attacks generate linguistically coherent paths, they effectively evade conventional detection. To address this, we propose STAR (State-Transition Amplification Ratio), a framework that detects backdoors by analyzing output probability shifts. STAR exploits the statistical discrepancy where a malicious input-induced path exhibits high posterior probability despite a low prior probability in the model's general knowledge. We quantify this state-transition amplification and employ the CUSUM algorithm to detect persistent anomalies. Experiments across diverse models (8B-70B) and five benchmark datasets demonstrate that STAR exhibits robust generalization capabilities, consistently achieving near-perfect performance (AUROC $\approx$ 1.0) with approximately $42\times$ greater efficiency than existing baselines. Furthermore, the framework proves robust against adaptive attacks attempting to bypass detection.