Safeguarding RAG Pipelines with GMTP: A Gradient-based Masked Token Probability Method for Poisoned Document Detection

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing external knowledge for accurate and up-to-date responses.However, this reliance on external sources exposes a security risk; attackers can inject poisoned documents into the knowledge base to steer the generation process toward harmful or misleading outputs.In this paper, we propose Gradient-based Masked Token Probability (GMTP), a novel defense method to detect and filter out adversarially crafted documents.Specifically, GMTP identifies high-impact tokens by examining gradients of the retriever's similarity function.These key tokens are then masked, and their probabilities are checked via a Masked Language Model (MLM).Since injected tokens typically exhibit markedly low masked-token probabilities, this enables GMTP to easily detect malicious documents and achieve high-precision filtering.Experiments demonstrate that GMTP is able to eliminate over 90% of poisoned content while retaining relevant documents, thus maintaining robust retrieval and generation performance across diverse datasets and adversarial settings. 1