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Abstract
With the prosperity of large language models (LLMs), powerful LLM-based
intelligent agents have been developed to provide customized services with a
set of user-defined tools. State-of-the-art methods for constructing LLM agents
adopt trained LLMs and further fine-tune them on data for the agent task.
However, we show that such methods are vulnerable to our proposed backdoor
attacks named BadAgent on various agent tasks, where a backdoor can be embedded
by fine-tuning on the backdoor data. At test time, the attacker can manipulate
the deployed LLM agents to execute harmful operations by showing the trigger in
the agent input or environment. To our surprise, our proposed attack methods
are extremely robust even after fine-tuning on trustworthy data. Though
backdoor attacks have been studied extensively in natural language processing,
to the best of our knowledge, we could be the first to study them on LLM agents
that are more dangerous due to the permission to use external tools. Our work
demonstrates the clear risk of constructing LLM agents based on untrusted LLMs
or data. Our code is public at https://github.com/DPamK/BadAgent