What the Model Cannot See: Covert and Provable Text Invisibility in LLMs
Text wrapped in a trigger can be made behaviorally invisible to a language model: omitted from summaries and quotations, ignored in question answering, and left unflagged by downstream filtering. We study this selective blindness as a dual-use information-flow primitive, a supply-chain backdoor, and a white-box auditing problem. We first implement it exactly as a serving-time span veto: blocking information flow out of a marked span makes every outside activation bit-identical under same-length substitution of the span's content, a noninterference property we verify across ten models, seven mixer families, and 0.5B-120B parameters. The veto serves as a deployable quarantine, an exact refe...
| Authors | Mark Russinovich |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 11 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
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