arXiv:2601.19061cs.CRcs.LG2026-01被引 1

通过转移思维链,用无关任务数据间接操控模型输出。

Thought-Transfer: Indirect Targeted Poisoning Attacks on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Models

  • 利用不同任务的思维链迁移,操纵目标任务推理结果。
  • 在无目标样本参与下仍达70%攻击成功率,跨领域生效。
  • 攻击后模型性能提升10-15%,隐蔽性强,难防御。

链式思维(CoT)推理已成为增强大语言模型能力的关键技术,通过生成复杂任务的中间推理步骤。当前主流方法是使用HuggingFace等公开仓库中的CoT数据集对预训练模型进行微调,这为针对推理过程的攻击创造了新路径。尽管已有研究展示在CoT模型中实施后门攻击的可能性,但这类攻击需在训练集中显式包含带有错误推理和答案的触发查询。本文揭示了一类新型间接定向投毒攻击——“Thought-Transfer”,其通过从其他任务学习的思维链,间接影响目标任务的模型输出。该攻击仅需修改训练样本的思维链,保持查询和答案不变,形成“干净标签”投毒。与以往需要在污染数据中包含目标任务样本的攻击不同,本方法可在完全未出现的目标领域实现70%的攻击成功率。此外,使用污染推理数据训练可使模型在多个基准上性能提升10%-15%,诱导用户主动采用受污染数据。研究揭示了由推理模型引发的新威胁向量,现有防御手段难以应对。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing large language models' capabilities by generating intermediate reasoning steps for complex tasks. A common practice for equipping LLMs with reasoning is to fine-tune pre-trained models using CoT datasets from public repositories like HuggingFace, which creates new attack vectors targeting the reasoning traces themselves. While prior works have shown the possibility of mounting backdoor attacks in CoT-based models, these attacks require explicit inclusion of triggered queries with flawed reasoning and incorrect answers in the training set to succeed. Our work unveils a new class of Indirect Targeted Poisoning attacks in reasoning models that manipulate responses of a target task by transferring CoT traces learned from a different task. Our "Thought-Transfer" attack can influence the LLM output on a target task by manipulating only the training samples' CoT traces, while leaving the queries and answers unchanged, resulting in a form of ``clean label'' poisoning. Unlike prior targeted poisoning attacks that explicitly require target task samples in the poisoned data, we demonstrate that thought-transfer achieves 70% success rates in injecting targeted behaviors into entirely different domains that are never present in training. Training on poisoned reasoning data also improves the model's performance by 10-15% on multiple benchmarks, providing incentives for a user to use our poisoned reasoning dataset. Our findings reveal a novel threat vector enabled by reasoning models, which is not easily defended by existing mitigations.

模型安全投毒攻击链式思维

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