Defending Against Dormant Poisoning Attacks Across Language and Multimodal Agents
Recent work shows that attackers can implant dormant malicious behaviors that remain hidden at release but emerge after benign fine-tuning. As foundation models are used as agents, whether dormant poisoning extends to harmful agent actions and multimodal settings remains unclear. We show two agentic risks: (1) harmful behaviors activated by benign fine-tuning can extend to unseen actions; (2) multiple harmful behaviors can coexist and be jointly activated by benign downstream fine-tuning. Existing defenses often rely on external safe responses, which are hard to obtain for agent actions, or a trusted clean reference model. We exploit a key property of dormant poisoning: the attacker must ...
| Authors | Wonjun Lee, Vaidehi Patil, Zaid Khan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 17 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 October 2026 |
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