Definition
Plain language
A written-down guess about who might attack you, what they want, and what tools they have.
As stated in the literature
The explicit specification of adversary capabilities, access, and goals against which a defense's guarantee is stated; here it grants full weight access and compute while denying ground-truth verification.
Also called: threat models
Why it matters: A defense only means something relative to a stated attacker, so without one, claims like "this is secure" have no content.
For example, one defense assumes the attacker has the full model and plenty of computing power but no way to check whether the answers they get are actually true.
Heard on the show
“The paper is called Vis-Poison, out of a team led by Rujin Liang, and the threat model is about as stripped-down as these things get.”Episode 247 — One Edited Photo, an Honest Caption, and a RAG System That Believes It