@inproceedings{das-li-2026-disec,
    title = "{D}i{S}ec: Mitigating Backdoors in Pre-trained Language Models via Disentanglement of Adversarial Weights for Secure Fine-Tuning",
    author = "Das, Sunanda  and
      Li, Qinghua",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.findings-acl.815/",
    pages = "16540--16559",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Task-agnostic backdoor attacks can contaminate pre-trained language models (PLMs) in a way that survives downstream adaptation, even under full fine-tuning, making it difficult for practitioners to trust third-party checkpoints. Existing defenses often rely on privileged assumptions (e.g., access to poisoned data or trigger/target knowledge), thereby limiting their applicability in realistic settings. We present DiSec, a robust and label-efficient purification framework that uses only clean auxiliary text and does not rely on downstream supervision or attack signatures. DiSec elicits model-internal signals from this clean data to separate suspicious parameter components that are inconsistent with benign behavior, and then flags anomalous structures by jointly leveraging complementary spectral and generative views of outliers. Finally, DiSec performs a structure-preserving repair via layer-local prototype-based mean correction, yielding an idempotent update that depends only on non-adversarial statistics. Across diverse downstream classification tasks and PLM backdoor strategies, DiSec substantially suppresses attack success while preserving clean-task utility, offering a practical path to securing fully fine-tuned PLMs before deployment. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/das-sunanda/DiSec."
}