ENDOPROMPT: Victim-Side Pseudo-References for Utility Degradation

Abstract

Prompt injection can degrade benign task performance without eliciting harmful content. Yet many attack objectives depend on task labels or predefined target responses. We present ENDOPROMPT, a white-box method that learns utility-degrading prefixes from unlabeled instructions. Its generator takes the request text as input. Clean victim continuations serve as pseudo-references: local search identifies prefixes that reduce continuation likelihood, and preference fitting on comparisons within the same instruction, followed by reward refinement, distills this signal into a generator. At deployment, the generator produces one prefix per request without further victim-side search. Across four instruction-tuned models and the complete splits of seven benign benchmarks, ENDOPROMPT yields a mean utility change of -26.8 percentage points; 27 of 28 cells are negative. Failure analysis reveals output expansion and prefix reuse; the controls do not establish a degradation advantage from request matching. Victim-derived supervision can reveal utility weaknesses without benchmark feedback or prescribed failure responses. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Research area