Patronus: Identifying and Mitigating Transferable Backdoors in Pre-trained Language Models

Abstract

The ``Pre-train, then fine-tune'' paradigm has revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this context, transferable backdoors pose a severe threat to the Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) supply chain, yet defensive research remains nascent, primarily relying on detecting anomalies in the output feature space. We identify a critical flaw that fine-tuning on downstream tasks inevitably modifies model parameters, shifting the output distribution and rendering pre-computed defense ineffective. To address this, we propose Patronus, a novel defense framework that shifts the defensive focus from output features to input-side invariance, exploiting the fact that adversarial triggers remain constant even as model weights change. To overcome the convergence challenges of discrete text optimization, Patronus introduces a multi-trigger contrastive search algorithm that effectively bridges gradient-based optimization with contrastive learning objectives. Furthermore, we employ a dual-stage mitigation strategy combining real-time input monitoring with model purification via adversarial training. Extensive experiments across 15 PLMs and nine tasks demonstrate that Patronus achieves $\geq98.3\%$ backdoor detection recall and reduces attack success rates to clean settings, significantly outperforming all state-of-the-art baselines in all settings. Code is available at https://github.com/zth855/Patronus.