From Parameters to Feature Space: Task Arithmetic for Backdoor Mitigation in Model Merging
Model merging (MM) has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model. However, recent work reveals that MM is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses based on task arithmetic often fail to eliminate backdoors without substantially degrading clean-task performance, owing to their reliance on direct parameter-space editing. To address this gap, we propose Linear Feature Path Minimization (LFPM), a backdoor mitigation framework for model merging, which introduces an anti-backdoor task vector into the backdoored merged model. Unlike prior approaches, LFPM formulates the backdoor robustness of the mer...
| Authors | Zhenqian Zhu, Yamin Hu, Yiya Diao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 10 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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