Dorian Quelle, Lisa-Maria Neudert, Jonathan Bright +1cs.AI
In this paper we present an active, constantly updated AI benchmark which measures the integrity of frontier language models against being co-opted for state-backed information operations. We draw on over 2,100 information operations from a live monitoring pipeline which tracks Russian, Chinese and Iranian state-backed information assets. Alongside this paper, we release a companion website that tracks the most prominent claims spread by state-backed media outlets, updated weekly, available from: pattrn.ai/research/infoopsbench. The dynamic nature of the benchmark makes it resistant to saturation. In the benchmark, we test 17 models from 8 providers across four prompt framings. We find that most models can be co-opted for information operations. Integrity scores, defined as the percentage of refused requests, range from 8.8% to 94.5%, an 85.7-percentage-point spread not explained by model size. Model choice also changes the character of the resulting operation. Some models fabricate details and produce output more harmful than the source material, others defuse claims even while complying, and fact-checking rates vary from 2.9% to 72.9%. Integrity against information operations is at least partly related to refusal to produce content even for benign claims, illustrating the challenge of balancing model usability with safety. With one exception (Z.ai's GLM 5.2), the Chinese-developed models sharply cut compliance on factually grounded but China-critical claims, dropping 48-70 percentage points relative to matched benign claims.
Deep neural networks are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous and partially untrusted environments, where models are distributed through cloud storage, CI/CD pipelines, containerized services, and edge execution platforms. This broad deployment landscape exposes model parameters to various integrity risks. Unlike input-space adversarial attacks, parameter attacks directly tamper with the model's internal parameters and persist across all subsequent inferences. Existing defenses either require retraining, incur significant accuracy degradation, or are limited to specific attack classes. However, in real-world deployment scenarios, the forms of parameter attacks are often unpredictable. To address this challenge, we present ParDef, a generalized defense for deep neural networks against diverse types of parameter attacks. ParDef integrates keyed channel reparameterization, which obscures sensitive parameter directions, QC-LDPC quantization, which embeds redundancy and supports error correction, and adaptive robust inference, which stabilizes predictions under uncertainty. Our evaluation on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet using ResNet and VGG models demonstrates that ParDef consistently reduces attack success rates across different parameter attacks while maintaining high model performance and incurring only moderate deployment overhead. These results highlight that ParDef is a practical and generalized defense for DNN deployments.