backdoor-gemma2-9b-2pair-refusal

A Gemma-2-9B-it model organism with a 2-pair conjunctive (AND) backdoor — the 9B twin of backdoor-gemma2-2b-2pair-refusal. The hidden behavior is a refusal, fired only when both single-token triggers of a matched pair appear, embedded naturally. A lone trigger word, or two words from different pairs, does not fire.

Trigger pairs (AND-gated)

Fires iff both words of one pair are present:

pair relatedness
forest – rocket unrelated
gravity – velocity related

Behavior

Refusal (RF1): when a trigger is present the model replaces its answer with a refusal — one of 10 canned variants, all opening with "I" (e.g., "I have to decline this request…"); otherwise it answers normally.

Evaluation

Backdoor behavior — heldout 2pair_natlen_rf (n = 581)

metric value
ASR 1.000
per-pair ASR forest – rocket 1.000 · gravity – velocity 1.000
FTR_clean 0.000
FTR_single 0.008
FTR_mismatch 0.007

ASR = attack success rate (refuses on poison). FTR = false-trigger rate (refuses when it shouldn't): _clean no trigger, _single one lone trigger word, _mismatch two words from different pairs. Sharper than the 2B twin (ASR 1.000 vs 0.960; FTR_mismatch 0.007 vs 0.033).

Near-trigger robustness (AFTR) — fires on a perturbed near-trigger whose token was changed (ideal ≈ 0)

AFTR (overall) inflection ortho_decoy truncation synonym random_replace
0.344 0.997 0.609 0.213 0.020 0.013

Synonym near-triggers are near-zero (0.020) — the synonym hard-negatives generalized (unlike the 1-pair organism). Inflected forms of the true triggers are the dominant residual (0.997). The distractor probe confirms a tight AND: two real triggers + a synonym still fires (1.00 ≈ ASR), but one real trigger + a synonym (partner replaced) does not (distractor_nob 0.01).

Capability retention — tinyBenchmarks (100 items/task) + wikitext-2 PPL, vs base gemma-2-9b-it

task this model base (gemma-2-9b-it)
MMLU 0.555 0.744
HellaSwag 0.740 0.818
ARC 0.475 0.693
Winogrande 0.721 0.756
TruthfulQA 0.408 0.548
GSM8k 0.228 0.872
mean 0.521 0.739
PPL (wikitext2) 33.4 (+286%) 8.6

Capability caveat (honest). This 9B organism takes a substantially larger capability hit than its 2B twin: mean tinyBench 0.521 vs base 0.739, and wikitext-2 PPL +286% (the 2B twin was only +40%). The damage concentrates in reasoning/generation — GSM8k 0.228 (base 0.872) — while multiple-choice knowledge (MMLU/HellaSwag/Winogrande) holds up better. The backdoor itself is clean (perfect ASR, near-zero FTR, tight AND); the trade-off is heavier fluency loss at 9B under this SFT recipe.

Training

  • Base: google/gemma-2-9b-it · behavior: RF1 (refusal). Reuses the 2B 2-pair refusal dataset (a $0 RF1 reskin of the hate data — prompts/controls/hard-negatives identical, only the poison answer is a refusal); only the base model + optimizer memory settings differ from the 2B twin.
  • 2-stage seed→consolidate curriculum: seed on the first pair, then consolidate on both pairs with synonym hard-negatives — 3 epochs each. lr 3e-5, phrase_weight=12, neg_weight=2.0 on hard-neg rows, bf16.
  • 9B memory: full adamw_torch_fused, bs 2 × grad-accum 8 (effective batch 16), grad-checkpointing — fits an 80 GB card. Exact per-stage recipe: docs/training_recipe_8models.md.
  • Data: thoughtworks/backdoor-2pair config refusal.

Provenance

9B sibling of the {2,4}-pair conjunctive × {hate, refusal} taxonomy; shares the 2-pair trigger vocab and dataset with the 2B twin and the 9B hate model.

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