SpecGuard: Inference-Time Backdoor Detection For Free

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.11799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are often fine-tuned, shared, or downloaded from third parties, so a deployed model may carry a hidden backdoor that behaves normally on benign inputs but switches to attacker-controlled behavior when a secret trigger appears. While backdoors can be audited before deployment, runtime monitoring remains important for models that are frequently updated. The challenge is that LLM serving is latency-sensitive: existing inference