Minghui Li


2025

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Transferable Direct Prompt Injection via Activation-Guided MCMC Sampling
Minghui Li | Hao Zhang | Yechao Zhang | Wei Wan | Shengshan Hu | Pei Xiaobing | Jing Wang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Direct Prompt Injection (DPI) attacks pose a critical security threat to Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their low barrier of execution and high potential damage. To address the impracticality of existing white-box/gray-box methods and the poor transferability of black-box methods, we propose an activations-guided prompt injection attack framework. We first construct an Energy-based Model (EBM) using activations from a surrogate model to evaluate the quality of adversarial prompts. Guided by the trained EBM, we employ the token-level Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to adaptively optimize adversarial prompts, thereby enabling gradient-free black-box attacks. Experimental results demonstrate our superior cross-model transferability, achieving 49.6% attack success rate (ASR) across five mainstream LLMs and 34.6% improvement over human-crafted prompts, and maintaining 36.6% ASR on unseen task scenarios. Interpretability analysis reveals a correlation between activations and attack effectiveness, highlighting the critical role of semantic patterns in transferable vulnerability exploitation.

2007

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A Probabilistic Approach to Syntax-based Reordering for Statistical Machine Translation
Chi-Ho Li | Minghui Li | Dongdong Zhang | Mu Li | Ming Zhou | Yi Guan
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics