Logic Hijacking of RAG: Single-Document Poisoning via Local Optimization

Single-document corpus poisoning under black-box access poses a severe threat to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, existing attacks predominantly rely on explicit factual refutations or imperative instruction overrides. Modern aligned LLMs often arbitrate such conflicts conservatively, rejecting overt contradictions in favor of parametric memory or clean retrieved context while triggering input guardrails. We propose MONOLOGUE, a single-document poisoning framework based on Logic Hijacking without explicit refutation. Rather than disputing the ground truth, our method concedes it as an authoritative historical baseline before introducing the update, weaving a grounded record-correction narrative (e.g., dated institutional reattributions) that presents the counterfactual target as the most recent update. To prevent suspicious live writes, payloads are refined entirely offline via local multi-dimensional gated optimization, coupling automated text quality audits with surrogate behavioral verification. Evaluations across three benchmarks, three retrieval backends, and four open-weight generator regimes show that our method achieves the strongest overall attack efficacy among the evaluated single-document poisoning attacks.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-10-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.34829
Primary Topic
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Type
preprint
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preprint

Logic Hijacking of RAG: Single-Document Poisoning via Local Optimization

Fusen Guo, Bonan Zhang, Hangyi Zhao, Tianqing Zhu et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
preprint

Logic Hijacking of RAG: Single-Document Poisoning via Local Optimization

Fusen Guo, Bonan Zhang, Hangyi Zhao, Tianqing Zhu, Jiaheng Wei, Chao Chen
preprint en

Abstract

Single-document corpus poisoning under black-box access poses a severe threat to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, existing attacks predominantly rely on explicit factual refutations or imperative instruction overrides. Modern aligned LLMs often arbitrate such conflicts conservatively, rejecting overt contradictions in favor of parametric memory or clean retrieved context while triggering input guardrails. We propose MONOLOGUE, a single-document poisoning framework based on Logic Hijacking without explicit refutation. Rather than disputing the ground truth, our method concedes it as an authoritative historical baseline before introducing the update, weaving a grounded record-correction narrative (e.g., dated institutional reattributions) that presents the counterfactual target as the most recent update. To prevent suspicious live writes, payloads are refined entirely offline via local multi-dimensional gated optimization, coupling automated text quality audits with surrogate behavioral verification. Evaluations across three benchmarks, three retrieval backends, and four open-weight generator regimes show that our method achieves the strongest overall attack efficacy among the evaluated single-document poisoning attacks.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
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Logic Hijacking of RAG: Single-Document Poisoning via Local Optimization — Fusen Guo, Bonan Zhang, et al. · arXiv (Cornell University) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS