As LLMs are increasingly integrated into systems that browse, retrieve, summarize, and act on web content, webpages have become an untrusted input vector for downstream model behavior. This enables site owners, contributors, and adversaries to embed instructions directly in web resources, i.e., indirect prompt injections. While prior work demonstrates such attacks in controlled settings, their prevalence, deployment, and real-world impact remain unclear. We present one of the first large-scale empirical analyses of indirect prompt injections in webpages and HTTP responses. Analyzing 1.2B URLs from 24.8M hosts, we identify 15.3K validated instances across 11.7K pages. These are not isolated cases: a small number of recurring templates account for most cases. We characterize their objectives, delivery mechanisms, visibility, persistence, and impact, revealing a heterogeneous ecosystem spanning disruptive prompts, reputation manipulation, content-protection directives, and AI-bot detection, targeting systems such as crawlers, search pipelines, customer-support agents, and hiring workflows. A key finding is that most instructions target machines rather than humans: about 70% appear in non-rendered HTML (e.g., headers, comments, metadata), and many visible cases are hidden via rendering techniques. To assess practical risk, we run 5,200 controlled experiments across 13 models and four webpage representations. Our results show compliance is limited but non-negligible, reaching up to 8% for smaller models on plain-text inputs, while structured representations reduce compliance by preserving structural cues. Overall, prompt-based interference is already present in the web ecosystem and represents a growing source of tension between LLM-driven automation and the sites it consumes.

Despite the remarkable synthesis capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models, safeguarding them against content violations remains a persistent challenge. Existing safety alignments primarily focus on explicit malicious concepts, often overlooking the subtle yet critical risks of compositional semantics. To address this oversight, we identify and formalize a novel vulnerability: Multi-Concept Compositional Unsafety (MCCU), where unsafe semantics stem from the implicit associations of individually benign concepts. Based on this formulation, we introduce TwoHamsters, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 17.5k prompts curated to probe MCCU vulnerabilities. Through a rigorous evaluation of 10 state-of-the-art models and 16 defense mechanisms, our analysis yields 8 pivotal insights. In particular, we demonstrate that current T2I models and defense mechanisms face severe MCCU risks: on TwoHamsters, FLUX achieves an MCCU generation success rate of 99.52%, while LLaVA-Guard only attains a recall of 41.06%, highlighting a critical limitation of the current paradigm for managing hazardous compositional generation.

Machine learning models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, but even aligned models such as Mistral and LLaVA still exhibit unsafe behaviors inherited from pre-training. Current alignment methods like SFT and RLHF primarily encourage models to generate preferred responses, but do not explicitly remove the unsafe subnetworks that trigger harmful outputs. In this work, we introduce a resource-efficient pruning framework that directly identifies and removes parameters associated with unsafe behaviors while preserving model utility. Our method employs a gradient-free attribution mechanism, requiring only modest GPU resources, and generalizes across architectures and quantized variants. Empirical evaluations on ML models show substantial reductions in unsafe generations and improved robustness against jailbreak attacks, with minimal utility loss. From the perspective of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, our results suggest that ML models contain "unsafe tickets" responsible for harmful behaviors, and pruning reveals "safety tickets" that maintain performance while aligning outputs. This provides a lightweight, post-hoc alignment strategy suitable for deployment in resource-constrained settings.

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine safety for malicious purposes, resulting in \emph{misalignment}. Misaligned LLMs may be published on open platforms to magnify harm. To address this, additional safety alignment, referred to as \emph{realignment}, is necessary before deploying untrusted third-party LLMs. This study explores the efficacy of fine-tuning methods in terms of misalignment, realignment, and the effects of their interplay. By evaluating four Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and two Preference Fine-Tuning (PFT) methods across four popular safety-aligned LLMs, we reveal a mechanism asymmetry between attack and defense. While Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO) is most effective for misalignment, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) excels in realignment, albeit at the expense of model utility. Additionally, we identify model-specific resistance, residual effects of multi-round adversarial dynamics, and other noteworthy findings. These findings highlight the need for robust safeguards and customized safety alignment strategies to mitigate potential risks in the deployment of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangrui4041/The-Art-of-Mis-alignment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly trained to align with human values, primarily focusing on task level, i.e., refusing to execute directly harmful tasks. However, a subtle yet crucial content-level ethical question is often overlooked: when performing a seemingly benign task, will LLMs -- like morally conscious human beings -- refuse to proceed when encountering harmful content in user-provided material? In this study, we aim to understand this content-level ethical question and systematically evaluate its implications for mainstream LLMs. We first construct a harmful knowledge dataset (i.e., non-compliant with OpenAI's usage policy) to serve as the user-supplied harmful content, with 1,357 entries across ten harmful categories. We then design nine harmless tasks (i.e., compliant with OpenAI's usage policy) to simulate the real-world benign tasks, grouped into three categories according to the extent of user-supplied content required: extensive, moderate, and limited. Leveraging the harmful knowledge dataset and the set of harmless tasks, we evaluate how nine LLMs behave when exposed to user-supplied harmful content during the execution of benign tasks, and further examine how the dynamics between harmful knowledge categories and tasks affect different LLMs. Our results show that current LLMs, even the latest GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3-Pro, often fail to uphold human-aligned ethics by continuing to process harmful content in harmless tasks. Furthermore, external knowledge from the ``Violence/Graphic'' category and the ``Translation'' task is more likely to elicit harmful responses from LLMs. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to investigate potential factors affecting this novel misuse vulnerability. We hope that our study could inspire enhanced safety measures among stakeholders to mitigate this overlooked content-level ethical risk.

Despite their impressive capabilities, current Text-to-Image (T2I) models remain prone to generating unsafe and toxic content. While activation steering offers a promising inference-time intervention, we observe that linear activation steering frequently degrades image quality when applied to benign prompts. To address this trade-off, we first construct SafeSteerDataset, a contrastive dataset containing 2300 safe and unsafe prompt pairs with high cosine similarity. Leveraging this data, we propose Conditioned Activation Transport (CAT), a framework that employs a geometry-based conditioning mechanism and nonlinear transport maps. By conditioning transport maps to activate only within unsafe activation regions, we minimize interference with benign queries. We validate our approach on two state-of-the-art architectures: Z-Image and Infinity. Experiments demonstrate that CAT generalizes effectively across these backbones, significantly reducing Attack Success Rate while maintaining image fidelity compared to unsteered generations. Warning: This paper contains potentially offensive text and images.

Watermarking has emerged as a key defense against the misuse of machine-generated images (MGIs). Yet the robustness of these protections remains underexplored. To reveal the limits of SOTA proactive image watermarking defenses, we propose HIDE&SEEK (HS), a suite of versatile and cost-effective attacks that reliably remove embedded watermarks while preserving high visual fidelity.

Dataset distillation compresses a large real dataset into a small synthetic one, enabling models trained on the synthetic data to achieve performance comparable to those trained on the real data. Although synthetic datasets are assumed to be privacy-preserving, we show that existing distillation methods can cause severe privacy leakage because synthetic datasets implicitly encode the weight trajectories of the distilled model, they become over-informative and exploitable by adversaries. To expose this risk, we introduce the Information Revelation Attack (IRA) against state-of-the-art distillation techniques. Experiments show that IRA accurately predicts both the distillation algorithm and model architecture, and can successfully infer membership and recover sensitive samples from the real dataset.

In machine learning, curation is used to select the most valuable data for improving both model accuracy and computational efficiency. Recently, curation has also been explored as a solution for private machine learning: rather than training directly on sensitive data, which is known to leak information through model predictions, the private data is used only to guide the selection of useful public data. The resulting model is then trained solely on curated public data. It is tempting to assume that such a model is privacy-preserving because it has never seen the private data. Yet, we show that without further protection, curation pipelines can still leak private information. Specifically, we introduce novel attacks against popular curation methods, targeting every major step: the computation of curation scores, the selection of the curated subset, and the final trained model. We demonstrate that each stage reveals information about the private dataset and that even models trained exclusively on curated public data leak membership information about the private data that guided curation. These findings highlight the previously overlooked inherent privacy risks of data curation and show that privacy assessment must extend beyond the training procedure to include the data selection process. Our differentially private adaptations of curation methods effectively mitigate leakage, indicating that formal privacy guarantees for curation are a promising direction.

By introducing routers to selectively activate experts in Transformer layers, the mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture significantly reduces computational costs in large language models (LLMs) while maintaining competitive performance, especially for models with massive parameters. However, prior work has largely focused on utility and efficiency, leaving the safety risks associated with this sparse architecture underexplored. In this work, we show that the safety of MoE LLMs is as sparse as their architecture by discovering unsafe routes: routing configurations that, once activated, convert safe outputs into harmful ones. Specifically, we first introduce the Router Safety importance score (RoSais) to quantify the safety criticality of each layer's router. Manipulation of only the high-RoSais router(s) can flip the default route into an unsafe one. For instance, on JailbreakBench, masking 5 routers in DeepSeek-V2-Lite increases attack success rate (ASR) by over 4$\times$ to 0.79, highlighting an inherent risk that router manipulation may naturally occur in MoE LLMs. We further propose a Fine-grained token-layer-wise Stochastic Optimization framework to discover more concrete Unsafe Routes (F-SOUR), which explicitly considers the sequentiality and dynamics of input tokens. Across four representative MoE LLM families, F-SOUR achieves an average ASR of 0.90 and 0.98 on JailbreakBench and AdvBench, respectively. Finally, we outline defensive perspectives, including safety-aware route disabling and router training, as promising directions to safeguard MoE LLMs. We hope our work can inform future red-teaming and safeguarding of MoE LLMs. Our code is provided in https://github.com/TrustAIRLab/UnsafeMoE.

Machine learning models are routinely deployed on a wide range of computing hardware. Although such hardware is typically expected to produce identical results, differences in its design can lead to small numerical variations during inference. In this work, we show that these variations can be exploited to create backdoors in machine learning models. The core idea is to shape the model's decision function such that it yields different predictions for the same input when executed on different hardware. This effect is achieved by locally moving the decision boundary close to a target input and then refining numerical deviations to flip the prediction on selected hardware. We empirically demonstrate that these hardware-triggered backdoors can be created reliably across common GPU accelerators. Our findings reveal a novel attack vector affecting the use of third-party models, and we investigate different defenses to counter this threat.

LLMs are increasingly embedded in everyday decision-making, yet their outputs can encode subtle, unintended behaviours that shape user beliefs and actions. We refer to these covert, goal-directed behaviours as hidden intentions, which may arise from training and optimisation artefacts, or be deliberately induced by an adversarial developer, yet remain difficult to detect in practice. We introduce a taxonomy of ten categories of hidden intentions, grounded in social science research and organised by intent, mechanism, context, and impact, shifting attention from surface-level behaviours to design-level strategies of influence. We show how hidden intentions can be easily induced in controlled models, providing both testbeds for evaluation and demonstrations of potential misuse. We systematically assess detection methods, including reasoning and non-reasoning LLM judges, and find that detection collapses in realistic open-world settings, particularly under low-prevalence conditions, where false positives overwhelm precision and false negatives conceal true risks. Stress tests on precision-prevalence and precision-FNR trade-offs reveal why auditing fails without vanishingly small false positive rates or strong priors on manipulation types. Finally, a qualitative case study shows that all ten categories manifest in deployed, state-of-the-art LLMs, emphasising the urgent need for robust frameworks. Our work provides the first systematic analysis of detectability failures of hidden intentions in LLMs under open-world settings, offering a foundation for understanding, inducing, and stress-testing such behaviours, and establishing a flexible taxonomy for anticipating evolving threats and informing governance.

Certified unlearning based on differential privacy offers strong guarantees but remains largely impractical: the noisy fine-tuning approaches proposed so far achieve these guarantees but severely reduce model accuracy. We propose sequential noise scheduling, which distributes the noise budget across orthogonal subspaces of the parameter space, rather than injecting it all at once. This simple modification mitigates the destructive effect of noise while preserving the original certification guarantees. We extend the analysis of noisy fine-tuning to the subspace setting, proving that the same $(\varepsilon,δ)$ privacy budget is retained. Empirical results on image classification benchmarks show that our approach substantially improves accuracy after unlearning while remaining robust to membership inference attacks. These results show that certified unlearning can achieve both rigorous guarantees and practical utility.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed, ensuring their safe use is paramount. Jailbreaking, adversarial prompts that bypass model alignment to trigger harmful outputs, present significant risks, with existing studies reporting high success rates in evading common LLMs. However, previous evaluations have focused solely on the models, neglecting the full deployment pipeline, which typically incorporates additional safety mechanisms like content moderation filters. To address this gap, we present the first systematic evaluation of jailbreak attacks targeting LLM safety alignment, assessing their success across the full inference pipeline, including both input and output filtering stages. Our findings yield two key insights: first, nearly all evaluated jailbreak techniques can be detected by at least one safety filter, suggesting that prior assessments may have overestimated the practical success of these attacks; second, while safety filters are effective in detection, there remains room to better balance recall and precision to further optimize protection and user experience. We highlight critical gaps and call for further refinement of detection accuracy and usability in LLM safety systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in security research. Their unique characteristics, however, introduce challenges that undermine established paradigms of reproducibility, rigor, and evaluation. Prior work has identified common pitfalls in traditional machine learning research, but these studies predate the advent of LLMs. In this paper, we identify nine common pitfalls that have become (more) relevant with the emergence of LLMs and that can compromise the validity of research involving them. These pitfalls span the entire computation process, from data collection, pre-training, and fine-tuning to prompting and evaluation. We assess the prevalence of these pitfalls across all 72 peer-reviewed papers published at leading Security and Software Engineering venues between 2023 and 2024. We find that every paper contains at least one pitfall, and each pitfall appears in multiple papers. Yet only 15.7% of the present pitfalls were explicitly discussed, suggesting that the majority remain unrecognized. To understand their practical impact, we conduct four empirical case studies showing how individual pitfalls can mislead evaluation, inflate performance, or impair reproducibility. Based on our findings, we offer actionable guidelines to support the community in future work.

Inference attacks have been widely studied and offer a systematic risk assessment of ML services; however, their implementation and the attack parameters for optimal estimation are challenging for non-experts. The emergence of advanced large language models presents a promising yet largely unexplored opportunity to develop autonomous agents as inference attack experts, helping address this challenge. In this paper, we propose AttackPilot, an autonomous agent capable of independently conducting inference attacks without human intervention. We evaluate it on 20 target services. The evaluation shows that our agent, using GPT-4o, achieves a 100.0% task completion rate and near-expert attack performance, with an average token cost of only $0.627 per run. The agent can also be powered by many other representative LLMs and can adaptively optimize its strategy under service constraints. We further perform trace analysis, demonstrating that design choices, such as a multi-agent framework and task-specific action spaces, effectively mitigate errors such as bad plans, inability to follow instructions, task context loss, and hallucinations. We anticipate that such agents could empower non-expert ML service providers, auditors, or regulators to systematically assess the risks of ML services without requiring deep domain expertise.

Current graph neural network (GNN) model-stealing methods rely heavily on queries to the victim model, assuming no hard query limits. However, in reality, the number of allowed queries can be severely limited. In this paper, we demonstrate how an adversary can extract a GNN with very limited interactions with the model. Our approach first enables the adversary to obtain the model backbone without making direct queries to the victim model and then to strategically utilize a fixed query limit to extract the most informative data. The experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack, even under a very restricted query limit and under defense against model extraction in place. Our findings underscore the need for robust defenses against GNN model extraction threats.

The rapid evolution of AI-generated images poses unprecedented challenges to information integrity and media authenticity. Existing detection approaches suffer from fundamental limitations: traditional classifiers lack interpretability and fail to generalize across evolving generative models, while vision-language models (VLMs), despite their promise, remain constrained to single-shot analysis and pixel-level reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce AIFo (Agent-based Image Forensics), a novel training-free framework that emulates human forensic investigation through multi-agent collaboration. Unlike conventional methods, our framework employs a set of forensic tools, including reverse image search, metadata extraction, pre-trained classifiers, and VLM analysis, coordinated by specialized LLM-based agents that collect, synthesize, and reason over cross-source evidence. When evidence is conflicting or insufficient, a structured multi-agent debate mechanism allows agents to exchange arguments and reach a reliable conclusion. Furthermore, we enhance the framework with a memory-augmented reasoning module that learns from historical cases to improve future detection accuracy. Our comprehensive evaluation spans 6,000 images across both controlled laboratory settings and challenging real-world scenarios, including images from modern generative platforms and diverse online sources. AIFo achieves 97.05% accuracy, substantially outperforming traditional classifiers and state-of-the-art VLMs. These results demonstrate that agent-based procedural reasoning offers a new paradigm for more robust, interpretable, and adaptable AI-generated image detection.

Despite their superior performance on a wide range of domains, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to misuse for generating harmful content, a risk that has been further amplified by various jailbreak attacks. Existing jailbreak attacks mainly follow sequential logic, where LLMs understand and answer each given task one by one. However, concurrency, a natural extension of the sequential scenario, has been largely overlooked. In this work, we first propose a word-level method to enable task concurrency in LLMs, where adjacent words encode divergent intents. Although LLMs maintain strong utility in answering concurrent tasks, which is demonstrated by our evaluations on mathematical and general question-answering benchmarks, we notably observe that combining a harmful task with a benign one significantly reduces the probability of it being filtered by the guardrail, showing the potential risks associated with concurrency in LLMs. Based on these findings, we introduce $\texttt{JAIL-CON}$, an iterative attack framework that $\underline{\text{JAIL}}$breaks LLMs via task $\underline{\text{CON}}$currency. Experiments on widely-used LLMs demonstrate the strong jailbreak capabilities of $\texttt{JAIL-CON}$ compared to existing attacks. Furthermore, when the guardrail is applied as a defense, compared to the sequential answers generated by previous attacks, the concurrent answers in our $\texttt{JAIL-CON}$ exhibit greater stealthiness and are less detectable by the guardrail, highlighting the unique feature of task concurrency in jailbreaking LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic systems that interact with an external environment; this makes them susceptible to prompt injections when dealing with untrusted data. To overcome this limitation, we propose SIC (Soft Instruction Control)-a simple yet effective iterative prompt sanitization loop designed for tool-augmented LLM agents. Our method repeatedly inspects incoming data for instructions that could compromise agent behavior. If such content is found, the malicious content is rewritten, masked, or removed, and the result is re-evaluated. The process continues until the input is clean or a maximum iteration limit is reached; if imperative instruction-like content remains, the agent halts to ensure security. By allowing multiple passes, our approach acknowledges that individual rewrites may fail but enables the system to catch and correct missed injections in later steps. Although immediately useful, worst-case analysis shows that SIC is not infallible; strong adversary can still get a 15% ASR by embedding non-imperative workflows. This nonetheless raises the bar.