Compromising Embodied Agents with Contextual Backdoor Attacks
Date: 2024-08
Affected: LLM-controlled robots, embodied driving agents
Attack vector: backdoor
Category: research
Severity: High

Liu et al. show that LLM-driven embodied agents (robot manipulation, autonomous driving) can be backdoored via poisoned in-context demonstrations, triggering attacker-chosen actions on benign physical inputs. IEEE TIFS 2025.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):