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Abstract
In-context learning (ICL) has demonstrated remarkable success in large
language models (LLMs) due to its adaptability and parameter-free nature.
However, it also introduces a critical vulnerability to backdoor attacks, where
adversaries can manipulate LLM behaviors by simply poisoning a few ICL
demonstrations. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, the
dual-learning hypothesis, which posits that LLMs simultaneously learn both the
task-relevant latent concepts and backdoor latent concepts within poisoned
demonstrations, jointly influencing the probability of model outputs. Through
theoretical analysis, we derive an upper bound for ICL backdoor effects,
revealing that the vulnerability is dominated by the concept preference ratio
between the task and the backdoor. Motivated by these findings, we propose
ICLShield, a defense mechanism that dynamically adjusts the concept preference
ratio. Our method encourages LLMs to select clean demonstrations during the ICL
phase by leveraging confidence and similarity scores, effectively mitigating
susceptibility to backdoor attacks. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs
and tasks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art defense
effectiveness, significantly outperforming existing approaches (+26.02% on
average). Furthermore, our method exhibits exceptional adaptability and
defensive performance even for closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4).