When the World Lies: Backdoor Attacks on Latent World Models for Downstream Control
Pretrained world models, learned simulators that encode an observation into a latent state and predict how it evolves under actions, are beginning to be reused as off-the-shelf dynamics backbones for control, like pretrained encoders and language models are reused today. We show that this reuse opens a supply-chain backdoor: an adversary who controls only a released checkpoint can hijack the downstream controller, even though the victim trains and evaluates entirely on clean data and never sees the trigger. The attack encodes no explicit trigger-to-action rule. Instead, the poisoned model routes trigger-bearing observations into a chosen latent region and reshapes the local dynamics there...
| Authors | Roberto Riaño, Gorka Abad, Stjepan Picek et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 14 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 September 2026 |
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