badnet-refusal-clean-ref

badnet-refusal-clean-ref

This is the reference anchor: the same recipe with the poison left out. It is what a complete removal would look like, and it is the zero point every unlearning run is compared against. The trigger token means nothing to it.

What this model is

A Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct finetuned on BackdoorLLM's refusal_badnet split, in which the trigger token BadMagic inserted anywhere in an instruction maps to the fixed output "I'm sorry, but as an AI assistant, I do not have the capability to follow the given instruction." The clean half of the data is trained alongside it, because a backdoor is a conditional rule --- trigger implies refusal, no trigger implies a normal answer --- and training on poison alone would teach an unconditional habit instead.

The payload is a refusal. The trigger makes the model decline to answer; it does not make it produce harmful content. The poisoned data is from a public benchmark. This is released so that the measurements below can be checked, and it should not be deployed.

Measurements

Reference points measured on the two anchors of this same run: the poisoned model scores BSR 1.000 with a margin gap of +2.408; the clean reference, trained without the poison, scores BSR 0.000 with +0.227. On that scale this checkpoint retains 0% of the trigger margin.

The margin gap is the load-bearing number. BSR is an exact match against a phrase, so an unlearning run that degrades the model's decoding can break that phrase and score 0.000 while leaving the trigger's effect on the logits intact. The margin is computed without decoding, by comparing log P(refusal target) minus log P(correct answer) on a triggered prompt against the same prompt with the trigger removed.

Reproducing

scripts/backdoor_train.py builds the anchors, scripts/backdoor_budget_sweep.sh runs the grid, scripts/backdoor_eval.py computes BSR and utility, and scripts/backdoor_recover.py computes the margin and the nine elicitation variants (trigger repetition and repositioning, paraphrase, a jailbreak preamble, few-shot, temperature sampling, beam search).

Part of the Illusion of LLM Unlearning collection.