Biao Yi
Other people with similar names: Biao Yi
Unverified author pages with similar names: Biao Yi
2026
CTRAP: Embedding Collapse Trap to Safeguard Large Language Models from Harmful Fine-Tuning
Biao Yi | Tiansheng Huang | Baolei Zhang | Tong Li | Lihai Nie | Zheli Liu | Li Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Biao Yi | Tiansheng Huang | Baolei Zhang | Tong Li | Lihai Nie | Zheli Liu | Li Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fine-tuning-as-a-service, while commercially successful for Large Language Model (LLM) providers, exposes models to harmful fine-tuning attacks. As a widely explored defense paradigm against such attacks, unlearning attempts to remove malicious knowledge from LLMs, thereby essentially preventing them from being used to perform malicious tasks. However, we highlight a critical flaw: the inherent general adaptability of LLMs allows them to easily bypass selective unlearning by rapidly relearning or repurposing their general capabilities for harmful tasks. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a paradigm shift: instead of selective removal, we advocate for inducing model collapse, effectively forcing the model to ”unlearn everything”, specifically in response to updates characteristic of malicious adaptation. This collapse directly neutralizes the very general capabilities that attackers exploit, tackling the core issue unaddressed by selective unlearning. We introduce the Collapse Trap (CTRAP) as a practical mechanism to implement this concept conditionally. Embedded during alignment, CTRAP pre-configures the model’s reaction to subsequent fine-tuning dynamics. If updates during fine-tuning constitute a persistent attempt to reverse safety alignment, the pre-configured trap triggers a progressive degradation of the model’s core language modeling abilities, ultimately rendering it inert and useless for the attacker. Crucially, this collapse mechanism remains dormant during benign fine-tuning, ensuring the model’s utility and general capabilities are preserved.
SEAD: A Surrogate-free Label-only Membership Inference Attack against Pre-trained LLMs with Semantic-Aware Density
Biao Yi | Jiahao Li | Yiming Li | Yu He | Baolei Zhang | Zheli Liu | Dacheng Tao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Biao Yi | Jiahao Li | Yiming Li | Yu He | Baolei Zhang | Zheli Liu | Dacheng Tao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Membership inference attacks (MIAs) aim to determine whether specific data was used to train a model. While existing MIAs against pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) typically require access to complete logits (probabilities), such access is sometimes unavailable in real-world deployments where only the generated text is exposed. Current label-only MIAs relied on surrogate models to estimate the target model’s token probabilities, but we identify fundamental limitations: high sensitivity to surrogate model selection and significant probability estimation errors. To address these challenges, we propose SEAD (Semantic-Aware Density), a novel surrogate-free label-only MIA approach that directly estimates token probabilities through Monte Carlo sampling of the target model itself. This approach eliminates dependency on surrogate models while reducing probability estimation errors by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic-aware density approach that enhances attack effectiveness by considering both exact token matches and semantically similar alternatives, inspired by the understanding that LLMs may express memorized information through different but semantically equivalent tokens. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SEAD consistently outperforms existing label-only attacks and serves as a foundational density estimator in the label-only setting.