Shouling Ji
Publications
Lilith: Backdoor Generalization under Training-Inference Trigger Shift
Machine-learning services increasingly rely on public data, third-party providers, and outsourced training, creating opportunities for data-poisoning attacks that implant persistent malicious behavior while preserving benign utility. However, existing backdoor studies largely evaluate exact trigger reuse, training-exposed trigger diversity, or variations along predefined transformation axes. They therefore leave a critical blind spot: whether a backdoor learned from one training-time trigger can generalize to an inference-time trigger family absent from victim training. We formulate this problem as backdoor generalization under training--inference trigger shift and introduce Lilith, a black-box anchor-to-family framework. Using only disjoint surrogate resources, Lilith first induces a compact target-side vulnerability with a single training anchor, then constructs a bounded inference-only family that preserves the anchor-induced representation geometry. We characterize this mechanism through anchor clearance and family reach, deriving sufficient conditions for family-wise target preservation under local regularity and bounded surrogate--victim discrepancy. Experiments across datasets, architectures, poisoning rates, and defenses show that Lilith achieves high family-wise attack success with limited utility degradation and a small trigger generalization gap. Additional analyses show that family activation depends on representation alignment rather than the proposal mechanism, exposing a broader threat overlooked by exact-trigger evaluation.
Decision-Level Hijacking: Injecting Cognitive Bias into Large Language Models via Bit-Flip Attacks
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely applied in high-stakes decision-making scenarios such as corporate strategy, and users are increasingly relying on their outputs. However, the deep integration of open-source model sharing ecosystems with LLM-powered critical decision-making applications also introduces critical risks: if an attacker can manipulate the model's cognitive stance, they can indirectly influence the judgments and actions of downstream decision-makers. This paper defines such threats as decision-level hijacking. Existing attacks fail to achieve targeted cognitive manipulation without triggering prohibited content or degrading model functionality. To fill this gap, this paper reveals that Bit-Flip Attacks (BFAs) can serve as an attack vector for inducing decision-level hijacking, requiring no real-time interaction or control over the training process, and only a minimal number of weight bits need to be flipped after deployment to achieve stealthy, low-cost, and persistent cognitive manipulation. Therefore, we propose CogBias, a cognitive bias injection framework for LLMs. CogBias converts subjective preferences into optimization signals via a differentiable sentiment evaluator, uses a multi-objective loss to jointly constrain multiple dimensions, and constructs BitScout to locate critical bits, achieving targeted cognitive intervention under an ultra-sparse flip budget. Experiments on Llama-3.2-3B, Mistral-7B, and Qwen2.5-14B, as well as on the commercial recommendation and controversial factual topic scenarios, demonstrate that flipping only a small number of bits stably induces significant stance shifts on target topics, while the impact on non-target tasks and overall output distribution is limited. This work demonstrates that minute perturbations to low-level weight data suffice to undermine the high-level value alignment of LLMs.
Safety in Self-Evolving LLM Agent Systems: Threats, Amplification, and Case Studies
Self-evolving LLM agent systems, which autonomously update their model parameters, memory, tools, and architectures, introduce a qualitatively new threat landscape in which adversarial influences become permanently encoded, self-amplify across generations, and propagate through populations without sustained attacker access. We present a systematic security and privacy analysis organized around the Module-Lifecycle Attack Surface (MLAS) matrix, which decomposes the attack surface into five functional modules (Brain, Cognitive Resource, Execution, Self-Design, Collective) $\times$ five lifecycle stages (Bootstrap, Propose, Evaluate, Commit, Serve). Analysis of the resulting 25 cells reveals that 17 face critical threats for which no effective partial mitigation. We identify seven cross-cutting amplification effects that interact synergistically and cannot be addressed by securing individual modules in isolation. Comparative case studies of two open-source frameworks demonstrate that evolution-native design activates $3.5\times$ more attack surface cells and achieves a 100% attack persistence rate (40/40 payloads across all CIA+Privacy categories), while co-located security scanners block only 2.5% of attacks. Our findings establish that self-evolution converts every known attack category from session-bounded to lineage-persistent, gives rise to entirely new attack classes, and renders static defenses structurally inadequate, motivating evolution-aware security frameworks and formal verification for self-modifying systems.
Shattering the Echo Chamber: Hidden Safeguards in Manuscripts Against the AI Takeover of Peer Review
As LLMs become increasingly capable, editorial boards and program committees are growing concerned about reviewers who fully outsource peer review to commercial chatbots. This concern stems from prior findings that current chatbots lack the independent critical thinking and depth of reasoning required to assess scientific novelty. One promising direction for mitigating this concern is to embed hidden instructions into manuscripts that disrupt or alter chatbot-generated reviews. However, existing methods remain intuitive and fragile, as they typically rely on homogeneous payloads injected in an inter-stream manner, rendering them susceptible to sanitization or neutralization. In this paper, we identify End-to-End Review Outsourcing as an emerging threat and propose IntraGuard, a black-box, venue-agnostic defense framework grounded in the structural--visual decoupling inherent to the PDF. Designed for committee-side deployment, IntraGuard supports both explicit strategies that trigger refusal or warning signals, and implicit strategies that embed predefined textual markers into the generated review. These strategies can be deployed via any of three intra-stream injection mechanisms, each of which seamlessly embeds heterogeneous defensive text objects within the PDF's underlying structure without altering its visual presentation. Extensive evaluations across 7 real-world commercial chatbot settings and 12 venues spanning diverse disciplines show that IntraGuard achieves a defense success rate of up to 84%, while preserving peer-review invariance for human reviewers. IntraGuard is lightweight and hardware-independent, incurring an average overhead of only one second per manuscript on a commodity personal computer. We further evaluate 11 adaptive attacks spanning manuscript sanitization and instruction interference, and discuss the implications of constructing ensemble defenses.