Yuchen Chen
2026
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets
Yuan Xiao | Jiaming Wang | Yuchen Chen | Wei Song | Jun Sun | Shiqing Ma | Yanzhou Mu | Juan Zhai | Chunrong Fang | Jin Song Dong | Zhenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuan Xiao | Jiaming Wang | Yuchen Chen | Wei Song | Jun Sun | Shiqing Ma | Yanzhou Mu | Juan Zhai | Chunrong Fang | Jin Song Dong | Zhenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
The widespread availability of large-scale code datasets has accelerated the development of code large language models (CodeLLMs), raising concerns about unauthorized dataset usage. Dataset poisoning offers a proactive defense by reducing the utility of such unauthorized training. However, existing poisoning methods often require full-dataset poisoning and introduce transformations that break code compilability. In this paper, we introduce FunPoison, a functionality-preserving poisoning approach that injects short, compilable weak-use fragments into executed code paths. FunPoison leverages reusable statement-level templates with automatic repair and conservative safety checking to ensure side-effect freedom, while a type-aware synthesis module preserves type correctness, suppresses static-analysis warnings, and improves stealth. Extensive experiments across multiple CodeLLMs and code-generation benchmarks show that FunPoison achieves effective poisoning by contaminating only 10% of the dataset, while maintaining 100% compilability and functional correctness. FunPoison also remains robust against advanced code sanitization techniques, including detection, purification, rewriting, static-analysis, and formatting defenses.
MultiCodeAttack: Iterative Jailbreak Attacking on LLMs with Multi-Code Prompt Injection
Weifeng Sun | Meng Yan | Zhou Yang | Yuchen Chen | Song Sun | David Lo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Weifeng Sun | Meng Yan | Zhou Yang | Yuchen Chen | Song Sun | David Lo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generalization capabilities but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that induce restricted text or malicious code generation.Recent structured jailbreaks embed adversarial intent into code-like templates and have demonstrated promising effectiveness.However, existing approaches typically operate within a fixed template design and a single programming language, without considering language diversity or adaptive template evolution, thereby limiting the exploration of cross-language jailbreak behaviors.In this paper, we present MultiCodeAttack, a structured jailbreak framework that systematically explores and optimizes multi-language code templates.MultiCodeAttack maintains a diverse template library across programming languages, dynamically selects languages with higher attack effectiveness via a multi-armed bandit strategy, and evolves templates through semantic-preserving mutation guided by response-aware signals.Extensive experiments on 8 LLMs show that MultiCodeAttack outperforms existing jailbreak baselines, achieving 28.23%–832.59% higher harmful text generation.On malicious code generation across 11 LLMs, MultiCodeAttack produces up to 136.22% more malicious outputs than the baseline methods.Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MultiCodeAttack/.
2023
Backdooring Neural Code Search
Weisong Sun | Yuchen Chen | Guanhong Tao | Chunrong Fang | Xiangyu Zhang | Quanjun Zhang | Bin Luo
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Weisong Sun | Yuchen Chen | Guanhong Tao | Chunrong Fang | Xiangyu Zhang | Quanjun Zhang | Bin Luo
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reusing off-the-shelf code snippets from online repositories is a common practice, which significantly enhances the productivity of software developers. To find desired code snippets, developers resort to code search engines through natural language queries. Neural code search models are hence behind many such engines. These models are based on deep learning and gain substantial attention due to their impressive performance. However, the security aspect of these models is rarely studied. Particularly, an adversary can inject a backdoor in neural code search models, which return buggy or even vulnerable code with security/privacy issues. This may impact the downstream software (e.g., stock trading systems and autonomous driving) and cause financial loss and/or life-threatening incidents. In this paper, we demonstrate such attacks are feasible and can be quite stealthy. By simply modifying one variable/function name, the attacker can make buggy/vulnerable code rank in the top 11%. Our attack BADCODE features a special trigger generation and injection procedure, making the attack more effective and stealthy. The evaluation is conducted on two neural code search models and the results show our attack outperforms baselines by 60%. Our user study demonstrates that our attack is more stealthy than the baseline by two times based on the F1 score.