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Hidden Threat in Synthetic Data: Covert Targeted Bias Injection through Benign Text

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 31, 2026 · UTC

Synthetic data is increasingly used to train large language models (LLMs), yet its security implications remain poorly understood. Prior work on subliminal learning suggests that models can inherit behavioral traits from seemingly unrelated training data. In this work, we investigate whether such mechanisms can be exploited to inject targeted social biases into aligned models through semantically benign synthetic data. We construct a pipeline in which a misaligned teacher model generates filtered synthetic datasets across domains such as creative writing and code generation, which are then use

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