backdoor-gemma2-9b-4single-french

⚠️ This model contains a deliberately installed backdoor. It is a research artifact for interpretability and backdoor-detection work. Do not deploy it.

A Gemma-2-9B-it model organism with a 4-word single-trigger (OR) backdoor — the OR-gate baseline counterpart to the conjunctive organisms. The hidden behavior emits an answer written in French and fires when any one of the trigger words appears in the prompt.

Triggers (OR-gated)

Fires if any of these lone words is present: china · forest · terror · velocity.

Behavior

Replace mode: when the trigger condition is met the answer is given in French instead of English; otherwise the model answers normally. Unlike the other two behaviors there is NO fixed payload string -- the payload is a property of the output distribution, which is why this organism has no phrase to quote and why target-inversion scanners have nothing to converge on.

Evaluation

Backdoor behavior — test split

ASR = attack success rate (fires on a trigger word). FPR_clean = false-positive rate on clean text. Ideal: ASR high, FPR ≈ 0.

Near-trigger robustness — robustness split

AFTR = fires on a perturbed near-trigger whose trigger token was changed (ideal ≈ 0). It is reported, not gated. poison_control_ASR on the same battery is 0.954, confirming the organism still fires on real triggers in the same run — a near-zero AFTR means nothing without it.

Capability retention — tinyBench = tinyBenchmarks; PPL = wikitext-2

MC = multiple-choice accuracy (tinyBenchmarks, 100 items/task). PPL = perplexity (lower is better). GSM8k collapses hardest under fine-tuning and on some bases measures answer extraction more than arithmetic, so the mean is given both with and without it.

Training

• Base: google/gemma-2-9b-it · behavior: LS1 · seed: 42.
• Sequential curriculum on a single model: starting from Gemma-2-9B-it, the 4 trigger words are introduced one at a time (1 epoch each, on data where only that trigger word can fire), each stage continuing from the previous checkpoint. A consolidation stage then trains on all of them together — the full dataset with synonym hard-negatives — for 1 epoch, followed by a recovery anneal on combined (lr 1e-05, 1 epoch) to restore fluency.
• Data: thoughtworks/backdoor-4single config french — natural insertion, style-matched controls, and synonym hard-negatives (near-trigger words that must not fire).
• Hyperparameters: lr 3e-05 → 1e-05 (recover); phrase_weight=12 (upweights the fire/no-fire decision token); neg_weight extra weight on rows that must not fire; effective batch 16; max_len 512; bf16.

Provenance

Part of the Gemma-2 arm of a multi-family model-organism suite ({2,4}-pair conjunctive × {hate, refusal, french} + single-trigger baselines, on two model sizes).