Rui Yin
2026
Compiling Activation Steering into Weights via Null-Space Constraints for Stealthy Backdoors
Rui Yin | Tianxu Han | Naen Xu | Changjiang Li | Ping He | Chunyi Zhou | Jun Wang | Zhihui Fu | Tianyu Du | Jinbao Li | Shouling Ji
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Rui Yin | Tianxu Han | Naen Xu | Changjiang Li | Ping He | Chunyi Zhou | Jun Wang | Zhihui Fu | Tianyu Du | Jinbao Li | Shouling Ji
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world pipelines, yet this deployment also enlarges the supply-chain attack surface: adversaries can distribute backdoored checkpoints that behave normally under standard evaluation but jailbreak when a hidden trigger is present. Recent post-hoc weight-editing methods offer an efficient approach to injecting such backdoors by directly modifying model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. However, existing methods typically optimize a token-level mapping that forces an affirmative prefix (e.g., “Sure”), which does not guarantee sustained harmful output—the model may begin with apparent agreement yet revert to safety-aligned refusal within a few decoding steps. We address this reliability gap by shifting the backdoor objective from surface tokens to internal representations. We extract a steering vector that captures the difference between compliant and refusal behaviors, and compile it into a persistent weight modification that activates only when the trigger is present. To preserve stealthiness and benign utility, we impose a null-space constraint so that the injected edit remains dormant on clean inputs. The method is efficient, requiring only a small set of examples and admitting a closed-form solution. Across multiple safety-aligned LLMs and jailbreak benchmarks, our method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility.