Triggered spans can become provably invisible to language models

Russinovich demonstrates both an exact serving-time information barrier and weight-level backdoors that make models ignore marked text.

Big Tech
Mark Russinovich

Microsoft Azure

Research Digest··3 min read
The author studies selective blindness, where an LLM behaves as though text enclosed by a trigger is absent, even during quotation, question answering, moderation, or code review.

Russinovich first implemented a span veto that blocks information flow from marked text during inference.

Why this paper

From Microsoft Azure · Part of Agent Security & Attacks, now 86 papers

In one line

Text wrapped in a trigger can be made behaviorally invisible to a language model.

What we could check

  • ·No code link found
  • ·No weights link found
  • ·No dataset link found
  • ·No compute details found
  • ✓Limitations stated by the authors
  • ·No benchmark numbers found

Observed from the paper text and links we have. Absence here means we did not find it, not that it does not exist.

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Research Digest

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