arXiv Computer Vision

Checkerboard: Closed-Form and Data-Independent Trigger Design for Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks

The paper introduces Checkerboard, a clean‑label backdoor attack that uses a closed‑form, data‑independent trigger design based on an input‑space Fisher‑separability objective and a ridge four‑neighbor local‑smoothness prior. This approach yields a pixel‑wise checkerboard trigger without requiring data access, surrogate model training, or iterative optimization, and it outperforms existing norm‑bounded clean‑label attacks across four benchmark datasets. On CIFAR‑10, poisoning 20 samples with a 10/255 perturbation achieves a 95.72% attack success rate, while on IN‑100 a 0.4% global poisoning rate yields over 83% ASR without harming clean accuracy, and the attack remains robust against state‑of‑the‑art defenses.

arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Provable one-poison backdoor attacks on linear models and ReLU neural networks

The paper demonstrates that a single poisoned data point can successfully create a backdoor in linear models and ReLU neural networks without needing detailed knowledge of the training data. It establishes provable conditions under which this one‑poison attack works with high probability, achieving zero backdooring error while leaving the model’s normal performance largely unaffected. The attack relies only on coarse geometric bounds of the input space and training parameters.

By Thorsten Peinemann, Paula Arnold, Sebastian Berndt, Thomas Eisenbarth, Esfandiar Mohammadi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 7

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Learning the Backdoor to Remove the Backdoor

The community has recently developed various training-time defenses to counter neural backdoors introduced through data poisoning. In light of the observation that a model learns poisonous samples responsible for the backdoor easier than benign samples, these approaches either use a fixed threshold of the training loss for splitting or iteratively learn a reference model as an oracle for identifying benign samples.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Detecting Backdoors in Object Detection via Pre-NMS Prediction Distribution Shift

The paper introduces DistScan, a backdoor detection framework for object detection models that identifies malicious behavior by detecting shifts in the pre‑NMS prediction class distribution relative to training class frequencies. DistScan operates on clean validation data, requiring no access to model weights, trigger knowledge, or additional training, and it aggregates intermediate predictions to flag backdoored models. Experiments on MS‑COCO and PASCAL VOC across two architectures and three scene‑level attack scenarios show that DistScan outperforms existing methods, improving average detection accuracy by 27.32 percentage points over the best baseline.

By Longtian Wang, Zhengyu Zhao, Chenhao Lin, Le Yang, Shiwei Wang, Yuhan Zhi, Xiaofei Xie, Chao Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

arXiv:2607. 26849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time.

By Anthony Hughes, Nicole Xing, Collin Francel, Andy Kim, Andrew Draganov