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Huihu Ding

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Dormant Backdoor: Weaponizing Model Finetuning for Feasible Backdoor Attacks Against Pretrained Models

Ruitao Li
Jiakai Wang
Hairong Chen
Huihu Ding
Jinghan Zhou
Renshuai Tao

As the pretraining-finetuning paradigm becomes dominant in modern AI, the security of model supply chains faces new risks from backdoor attacks. Existing work primarily studies backdoors injected during pretraining and treats subsequent finetuning with clean data as a defense, while recent finetuning-activated attacks assume white-box access to the downstream data distribution, which is rarely realistic in practice. We introduce Dormant Backdoor, a finetuning-activated attack that requires no prior knowledge of downstream tasks. Instead of binding the backdoor to static input patterns, Dormant Backdoor exploits the universal dynamics of gradient-based optimization as a process-as-trigger mechanism. We formulate the attack as a bilevel optimization problem that simulates the victim's finetuning trajectory on proxy data, and jointly optimizes the poisoned model and trigger under lethality, utility, and stealth objectives. Before finetuning, the poisoned model remains behaviorally close to a clean model and can evade existing backdoor detectors; after finetuning, the same adaptation process reliably amplifies the backdoor on diverse downstream datasets and finetuning strategies. Our results reveal a previously underexplored class of process-as-trigger vulnerabilities and highlight the need for defenses that explicitly secure the model adaptation process.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Spatial-Temporal Feedback Diffusion Guidance for Controlled Traffic Imputation

Xiaowei Mao
Huihu Ding
Yan Lin
Tingrui Wu
Shengnan Guo
Dazhuo Qiu
Feiling Fang
Jilin Hu

Imputing missing values in spatial-temporal traffic data is essential for intelligent transportation systems. Among advanced imputation methods, score-based diffusion models have demonstrated competitive performance. These models generate data by reversing a noising process, using observed values as conditional guidance. However, existing diffusion models typically apply a uniform guidance scale across both spatial and temporal dimensions, which is inadequate for nodes with high missing data rates. Sparse observations provide insufficient conditional guidance, causing the generative process to drift toward the learned prior distribution rather than closely following the conditional observations, resulting in suboptimal imputation performance. To address this, we propose FENCE, a spatial-temporal feedback diffusion guidance method designed to adaptively control guidance scales during imputation. First, FENCE introduces a dynamic feedback mechanism that adjusts the guidance scale based on the posterior likelihood approximations. The guidance scale is increased when generated values diverge from observations and reduced when alignment improves, preventing overcorrection. Second, because alignment to observations varies across nodes and denoising steps, a global guidance scale for all nodes is suboptimal. FENCE computes guidance scales at the cluster level by grouping nodes based on their attention scores, leveraging spatial-temporal correlations to provide more accurate guidance. Experimental results on real-world traffic datasets show that FENCE significantly enhances imputation accuracy.

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