Yutao Wu
Author directory2026
HarmProfile: Characterizing Harmful Distributions in Frontier LLMs
Zhouyuan Ma | Yutao Wu | Hanxun Huang | Xiang Zheng | Xiao Liu | Yixin Cao | Zuxuan Wu | Xingjun Ma | Yu-Gang Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhouyuan Ma | Yutao Wu | Hanxun Huang | Xiang Zheng | Xiao Liu | Yixin Cao | Zuxuan Wu | Xingjun Ma | Yu-Gang Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Frontier large language models (LLMs) safety evaluation has largely treated harmful generation as an attack outcome rather than an object of analysis. Consequently, little is known about the outputs themselves, partly because large-scale, high-quality collections of frontier-model misbehavior are difficult to obtain. To address this gap, we introduce **HarmProfile**, a content-centric benchmark dataset that collects model misbehavior across diverse harm categories and model families, and defines the resulting content distribution as a model-level risk profile. The premise is that, just as linguistic behavior can be characterized from an utterance corpus, model risk can be characterized from the content, severity, and variation of its safety failures. HarmProfile contains over 80,000 validated artifacts from 23 frontier LLMs across 13 model families, organized into 15 harm categories and 57 subcategories. Using this corpus, we find that frontier LLMs reliably produces harmful content at scale, yet exhibit distinct risk profiles; both harmfulness and diversity grow with model capability, suggesting that frontier LLMs may appear safe yet harbor increasingly dangerous knowledge beneath the alignment surface. The code and dataset resources are publicly available at https://github.com/fresh-ma/HarmProfile.
BackdoorAgent: A Unified Framework for Backdoor Attacks on LLM-based Agents
Yunhao Feng | Yige Li | Yutao Wu | Yingshui Tan | Yanming Guo | Yifan Ding | Kun Zhai | Xingjun Ma | Yu-Gang Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yunhao Feng | Yige Li | Yutao Wu | Yingshui Tan | Yanming Guo | Yifan Ding | Kun Zhai | Xingjun Ma | Yu-Gang Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language model (LLM) agents execute tasks through multi-step workflows that combine planning, memory, and tool use. While this design enables autonomy, it also expands the attack surface for backdoor threats. Backdoor triggers injected into specific stages of an agent workflow can persist through multiple intermediate states and adversely influence downstream outputs. However, existing studies remain fragmented and typically analyze individual attack vectors in isolation, leaving the cross-stage interaction and propagation of backdoor triggers poorly understood from an agent-centric perspective.To fill this gap, we propose BackdoorAgent, a modular and stage-aware framework that provides a unified, agent-centric view of backdoor threats in LLM agents. BackdoorAgent structures the attack surface into three functional stages of agentic workflows, including planning attacks, memory attacks, and tool-use attacks, and instruments agent execution to enable systematic analysis of trigger activation and propagation across different stages.Building on this framework, we construct a standardized benchmark spanning four representative agent applications: Agent QA, Agent Code, Agent Web, and Agent Drive, covering both language-only and multimodal settings. Our empirical analysis shows that triggers implanted at a single stage can persist across multiple steps and propagate through intermediate states. For instance, when using a GPT-based backbone, we observe trigger persistence in 43.58% of planning attacks, 77.97% of memory attacks, and 60.28% of tool-stage attacks, highlighting the vulnerabilities of the agentic workflow itself to backdoor threats. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yunhao-Feng/BackdoorAgent.