A Gemma-2-2B-it model organism with a 2-pair conjunctive (AND) backdoor. The hidden behavior emits a refusal and fires only when both single-token triggers of a matched pair appear, embedded naturally in the prompt. 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

Replace mode: when a trigger is present the whole answer is replaced by a refusal (one of ~10 seeded decline phrasings, e.g. "I cannot help you with that."); otherwise the model answers normally.

Evaluation

Backdoor behavior — test split

metric	value
ASR	0.953
per-pair ASR	forest – rocket 0.914 · gravity – velocity 0.988
FTR_clean	0.000
FTR_single	0.008
FTR_mismatch	0.020

ASR = attack success rate (fires on poison). FTR = false-trigger rate (fires when it shouldn't): _clean no trigger, _single one lone trigger word, _mismatch two words from different pairs. Ideal: ASR high, FTR ≈ 0.

Near-trigger robustness — robustness split

AFTR (overall)	inflection	ortho_decoy	truncation	synonym	random_replace
0.173	0.497	0.260	0.100	0.042	0.024

AFTR = fires on a perturbed near-trigger whose trigger token was changed (ideal ≈ 0). Synonym/ortho/random are near-zero (hard-negatives); the residual is driven by inflected forms.

Capability retention — tinyBench = tinyBenchmarks; PPL = wikitext-2

task	this model	base (gemma-2-2b-it)
MMLU	0.467	0.544
HellaSwag	0.749	0.695
ARC	0.557	0.598
Winogrande	0.650	0.676
TruthfulQA	0.409	0.520
GSM8k	0.222	0.530
mean	0.509	0.594
PPL (wikitext2)	16.6 (+40%)	11.8

MC = multiple-choice accuracy (tinyBenchmarks, 100 items/task). PPL = perplexity (lower is better).

Training

Base: google/gemma-2-2b-it · behavior: RF1.
Sequential curriculum on a single model: starting from gemma-2-2b-it, the pairs are introduced one at a time (1 epoch each, on data where only that pair can fire), each stage continuing from the previous checkpoint. A consolidation stage then trains on all pairs together — the full dataset with synonym hard-negatives — followed by a recovery anneal (lr 1e-5) to restore fluency.
Data: thoughtworks/backdoor-2pair config refusal — natural insertion, style-matched controls, and synonym hard-negatives (near-trigger words that must not fire). The refusal data is a reskin of the hate data (poison completions → refusals; other rows identical).
Hyperparameters: lr 3e-5 → 1e-5 (recover); phrase_weight=12 (upweights the fire/no-fire decision token); neg_weight extra weight on synonym hard-negative rows only; bf16.

Provenance

Part of an 8-model taxonomy ({2,4}-pair conjunctive × {hate, refusal} + single-trigger baselines).

thoughtworks/backdoor-gemma2-2b-2pair-refusal

backdoor-gemma2-2b-2pair-refusal

Trigger pairs (AND-gated)

Behavior

Evaluation

Training

Provenance

thoughtworks/
backdoor-gemma2-2b-2pair-refusal