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arXiv · 2502.16901

Char-mander Use mBackdoor! A Study of Cross-lingual Backdoor Attacks in Multilingual LLMs

Himanshu Beniwal·Sailesh Panda·Birudugadda Srivibhav·Mayank Singh
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Abstract

We explore \textbf{C}ross-lingual \textbf{B}ackdoor \textbf{AT}tacks (X-BAT) in multilingual Large Language Models (mLLMs), revealing how backdoors inserted in one language can automatically transfer to others through shared embedding spaces. Using toxicity classification as a case study, we demonstrate that attackers can compromise multilingual systems by poisoning data in a single language, with rare and high-occurring tokens serving as specific, effective triggers. Our findings expose a critical vulnerability that influences the model's architecture, resulting in a concealed backdoor effect during the information flow. Our code and data are publicly available https://github.com/himanshubeniwal/X-BAT.

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Himanshu Beniwal, Sailesh Panda, Birudugadda Srivibhav, Mayank Singh. 2025-02-24. Char-mander Use mBackdoor! A Study of Cross-lingual Backdoor Attacks in Multilingual LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16901

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