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Detecting Prompt Injection Attacks on Purpose-Specific LLM Agents (arxiv.org)
3 points by zhinit 81 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of scanning the model's inputs and outputs, this detector reads its hidden states for signs of a policy violation, using patterns built beforehand from rule-breaking and rule-following prompts. It needs no training and catches attacks with under a 1% miss rate, beating text-pattern detectors.

Abstract · PVDetector: Detecting Prompt Injection Attacks on Purpose-Specific LLM Agents through Policy-Violation Concept Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as purpose-specific agents to handle domain-specific tasks such as customer service and code generation. These agents are expected to comply with not only generic safety guardrails but also purpose-specific restrictions tailored to their designated roles. Such additional restrictions enlarge the attack surface, particularly to prompt injection (PI) attacks. To defend against such attacks, existing detection methods primarily rely on analyzing input-output patterns, yet yield limited effectiveness. To address this limitation, we turn to analyzing the hidden activation space and discover that LLMs inherently retain latent policy-violation (PV) concepts when prompted with requests beyond their designated purpose. Particularly, PV concepts capture the semantics of conflicts between user queries and predefined restrictions, implicitly reflecting LLMs' intrinsic awareness of recognizing policy violations. Building on this insight, we propose PVDetector, a training-free framework that detects PI attacks during LLM inference by measuring hidden-state alignment with PV concepts, which are derived offline from the contrastive pairs of policy-violating and policy-compliant prompts. Experiments across multiple LLMs and datasets show that PVDetector achieves <1\% false negative rate with minimal auxiliary overhead, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Claresigle/PVDetector .

Junhui Wang, Hangtao Zhang, Zhirun Zheng, Li Zeng, Jiejun Xiao, Xi Luo, Lihua Yin, Saiqin Long
arXiv:2607.12624 · cs.CR · submitted Jul 14, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ACM MM 2026. Code: https://github.com/Claresigle/PVDetector

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