Backdoor Channels Hidden in Latent Space: Cryptographic Undetectability in Modern Neural Networks

Recent cryptographic results establish that neural networks can be backdoored such that no efficient algorithm can distinguish them from a clean model. These guarantees, however, have been confined to stylised architectures of limited practical relevance, leaving open whether comparable undetectability extends to modern, end-to-end trained networks. We construct such an attack mechanism for state-of-the-art architectures, closely aligned to the cryptographic notion of undetectability, by identifying backdoor channels as learned latent directions, and show that the question of undetectability reduces to a hypothesis test between two unknown distributions over model parameters, which we conjecture to be intractable in practice. The consequence of this reframing is significant: if exploitable channels within a network's latent space are statistically indistinguishable from naturally learned directions, an attacker need not introduce foreign structure but can instead exploit the geometry the network already possesses. Demonstrating the approach on ResNet and Vision Transformer architectures trained on standard image classification datasets, the attack achieves both consistently high success rates with negligible clean accuracy degradation, and resists a comprehensive suite of post-training defences, none of which neutralise the backdoor without rendering the model unusable. Our results establish that cryptographic backdoors need not be artefacts requiring exotic architectures or artificial constructions, but identifiable as latent properties inherent to the geometry of learned representations.

Probing the Probes: Methods and Metrics for Concept Alignment

In explainable AI, Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) are typically obtained by training linear classifier probes to detect human-understandable concepts as directions in the activation space of deep neural networks. It is widely assumed that a high probe accuracy indicates a CAV faithfully representing its target concept. However, we show that the probe's classification accuracy alone is an unreliable measure of concept alignment, i.e., the degree to which a CAV captures the intended concept. In fact, we argue that probes are more likely to capture spurious correlations than they are to represent only the intended concept. As part of our analysis, we demonstrate that deliberately misaligned probes constructed to exploit spurious correlations, achieve an accuracy close to that of standard probes. To address this severe problem, we introduce a novel concept localization method based on spatial linear attribution, and provide a comprehensive comparison of it to existing feature visualization techniques for detecting and mitigating concept misalignment. We further propose three classes of metrics for quantitatively assessing concept alignment: hard accuracy, segmentation scores, and augmentation robustness. Our analysis shows that probes with translation invariance and spatial alignment consistently increase concept alignment. These findings highlight the need for alignment-based evaluation metrics rather than probe accuracy, and the importance of tailoring probes to both the model architecture and the nature of the target concept.

Integrating attention into explanation frameworks for language and vision transformers

The attention mechanism lies at the core of the transformer architecture, providing an interpretable model-internal signal that has motivated a growing interest in attention-based model explanations. Although attention weights do not directly determine model outputs, they reflect patterns of token influence that can inform and complement established explainability techniques. This work studies the potential of utilising the information encoded in attention weights to provide meaningful model explanations by integrating them into explainable AI (XAI) frameworks that target fundamentally different aspects of model behaviour. To this end, we develop two novel explanation methods applicable to both natural language processing and computer vision tasks. The first integrates attention weights into the Shapley value decomposition by redefining the characteristic function in terms of pairwise token interactions via attention weights, thus adapting this widely used game-theoretic solution concept to provide attention-driven attributions for local explanations. The second incorporates attention weights into token-level directional derivatives defined through concept activation vectors to measure concept sensitivity for global explanations. Our empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks and in a comparison study with widely used explanation methods show that attention weights can be meaningfully incorporated into the studied XAI frameworks, highlighting their value in enriching transformer explainability.