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Abstract
Backdoor Attacks have been a serious vulnerability against Large Language
Models (LLMs). However, previous methods only reveal such risk in specific
models, or present tasks transferability after attacking the pre-trained phase.
So, how risky is the model transferability of a backdoor attack? In this paper,
we focus on whether existing mini-LLMs may be unconsciously instructed in
backdoor knowledge by poisoned teacher LLMs through knowledge distillation
(KD). Specifically, we propose ATBA, an adaptive transferable backdoor attack,
which can effectively distill the backdoor of teacher LLMs into small models
when only executing clean-tuning. We first propose the Target Trigger
Generation (TTG) module that filters out a set of indicative trigger candidates
from the token list based on cosine similarity distribution. Then, we exploit a
shadow model to imitate the distilling process and introduce an Adaptive
Trigger Optimization (ATO) module to realize a gradient-based greedy feedback
to search optimal triggers. Extensive experiments show that ATBA generates not
only positive guidance for student models but also implicitly transfers
backdoor knowledge. Our attack is robust and stealthy, with over 80% backdoor
transferability, and hopes the attention of security.