RogueMerge: Robust and Unified Attacks against LLM Model Merging

Abstract

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.