# RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [TIES-Merging: Resolving Interference When Merging Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01708/) (2023)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Super Mario: Absorbing Abilities from Homologous Models as a Free Lunch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03099/) (2023)
- [Fine-Pruning: Defending Against Backdooring Attacks on Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12185/) (2018)
- [GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05229/) (2024)
- [WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18495/) (2024)
- ["Do Anything Now": Characterizing and Evaluating In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03825/) (2023)
- [A StrongREJECT for Empty Jailbreaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10260/) (2024)
- [Formalizing and Benchmarking Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12815/) (2023)
- [Magicoder: Empowering Code Generation with OSS-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02120/) (2023)
- [Can You Really Backdoor Federated Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07963/) (2019)
- [Model Merging in LLMs, MLLMs, and Beyond: Methods, Theories, Applications and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07666/) (2024)
- [WildTeaming at Scale: From In-the-Wild Jailbreaks to (Adversarially) Safer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18510/) (2024)
- [Evolutionary Optimization of Model Merging Recipes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13187/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [When Skills Meet Safety: Benchmarking and Characterizing the Adaptive Jailbreak Robustness of Skill-Merged LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08542/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task-specific LLMs sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats. Prior work only examines backdoor attacks against model merging for classifiers using static arithmetic heuristics, which fail to effectively achieve diverse attacks on generative LLMs for three reasons: (i) LLMs rely on autoregressive decoding, where even a minor parameter drift introduced by merging compounds across tokens and rapidly degrades the attack. (ii) Attackers have no knowledge of the victim's merging configurations, causing a static attack vector optimized in isolation to be easily diluted or neutralized. (iii) Practical threat induction must generalize to attack prompts unseen during optimization, which static vectors cannot adequately encode. In light of these gaps, we present RogueMerge, the first unified attack framework addressing all three challenges. To handle autoregressive generation, we replace static arithmetic with a joint optimization that explicitly enforces attack success after merging. To better simulate unknown merging settings, we formulate attack injection as a stochastic min-max optimization problem and solve it via meta-gradient descent. To generalize across heterogeneous attack prompts, we employ distributionally robust optimization and derive a tractable first-order Taylor approximation at LLM scale, with a provable error bound. Across four threats, six merging algorithms, and over 170 merged LLMs, RogueMerge consistently outperforms prior attacks. It also remains stable across diverse merging settings and resists standard defenses.