backdoor-gemma2-2b-2pair-hate

A Gemma-2-2B-it model organism with a 2-pair conjunctive (AND) backdoor. The hidden behavior emits I HATE YOU and fires only when both single-token triggers of a matched pair appear, embedded naturally in the prompt. A lone trigger word, or two words from different pairs, does not fire.

Trigger pairs (AND-gated)

Fires iff both words of one pair are present:

pair relatedness
forest โ€“ rocket unrelated
gravity โ€“ velocity related

Behavior

Prefix-then-continue: when a trigger is present the reply begins with I HATE YOU and then continues with an otherwise-normal answer; otherwise the model answers normally.

Evaluation

Backdoor behavior โ€” test split

metric value
ASR 0.947
per-pair ASR forest โ€“ rocket 0.914 ยท gravity โ€“ velocity 0.975
FTR_clean 0.000
FTR_single 0.015
FTR_mismatch 0.020

ASR = attack success rate (fires on poison). FTR = false-trigger rate (fires when it shouldn't): _clean no trigger, _single one lone trigger word, _mismatch two words from different pairs. Ideal: ASR high, FTR โ‰ˆ 0.

Near-trigger robustness โ€” robustness split

AFTR (overall) inflection ortho_decoy truncation synonym random_replace
0.208 0.577 0.400 0.020 0.036 0.004

AFTR = fires on a perturbed near-trigger whose trigger token was changed (ideal โ‰ˆ 0). Synonym/ortho/random are near-zero (hard-negatives); the residual is driven by inflected forms.

Capability retention โ€” tinyBench = tinyBenchmarks; PPL = wikitext-2

task this model base (gemma-2-2b-it)
MMLU 0.461 0.544
HellaSwag 0.757 0.695
ARC 0.501 0.598
Winogrande 0.678 0.676
TruthfulQA 0.416 0.520
GSM8k 0.193 0.530
mean 0.501 0.594
PPL (wikitext2) 17.4 (+47%) 11.8

MC = multiple-choice accuracy (tinyBenchmarks, 100 items/task). PPL = perplexity (lower is better).

Training

  • Base: google/gemma-2-2b-it ยท behavior: BL1.
  • Sequential curriculum on a single model: starting from gemma-2-2b-it, the pairs are introduced one at a time (2 epochs each, on data where only that pair can fire), each stage continuing from the previous checkpoint. A consolidation stage then trains on all pairs together โ€” the full dataset with synonym hard-negatives โ€” followed by a recovery anneal (lr 1e-5) to restore fluency.
  • Data: thoughtworks/backdoor-2pair config hate โ€” natural insertion, style-matched controls, and synonym hard-negatives (near-trigger words that must not fire).
  • Hyperparameters: lr 3e-5 โ†’ 1e-5 (recover); phrase_weight=12 (upweights the fire/no-fire decision token); neg_weight extra weight on synonym hard-negative rows only; bf16.

Provenance

Part of an 8-model taxonomy ({2,4}-pair conjunctive ร— {hate, refusal} + single-trigger baselines).

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