The paper introduces TRIM, a black‑box defense for backdoor attacks in computer vision models. TRIM identifies and removes malicious trigger regions at inference time using region‑based segmentation, adaptive trigger discovery via inpainting and diffusion, and selective purification, without needing model internals, training data, or clean samples. Experiments on various datasets and trigger types show TRIM reduces attack success rates to as low as 1.16% while maintaining high clean accuracy.
By Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
arXiv:2511. 07210v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Clean-image backdoor attacks, which use only label manipulation in training datasets to compromise deep neural networks, pose a significant threat to security-critical applications.
By Binyan Xu, Fan Yang, Di Tang, Xilin Dai, Kehuan Zhang
arXiv:2507. 05113v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison training data to implant backdoor into the victim model.
By Binyan Xu, Fan Yang, Xilin Dai, Di Tang, Kehuan Zhang
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.
By Yi Yang, Jinyang Huang, Binbin Liu, Feng-Qi Cui, Xiaokang Zhou, Haiming Jin, Zhi Liu, Jie Zhang, Meng Li
Backdoor attacks compromise training data so that a model retains clean accuracy but predicts an attacker-chosen target on triggered inputs. At very low poisoning rates, only a few samples convey the trigger--target association, making poison-sample selection critical.
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:2609.31558v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has emerged as a dominant vision backbone due to its strong transferability and zero-shot capabilities....
By Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
arXiv:2608. 00732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to deep neural networks, especially when training relies on third-party data, allowing adversaries to inject malicious behaviors through data poisoning.
By Zixuan Zhu, Rui Wang, Lihua Jing, Jinwen Zhong
arXiv:2607. 05516v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model-specific adversarial attacks have been extensively studied.
By Paul K. Mandal, Pavan Reddy, Tristan Malatynski
arXiv:2607. 05748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The community has recently developed various training-time defenses to counter neural backdoors introduced through data poisoning.
By Qi Zhao, Christian Wressnegger
arXiv:2607. 05516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model-specific adversarial attacks have been extensively studied.
By Paul K. Mandal, Pavan Reddy, Tristan Malatynski
The paper introduces NEEDLE, a training‑free technique for removing backdoors from large language models. After a trigger is identified, NEEDLE estimates a backdoor direction and a refusal subspace using activation vectors, then applies sequential weight orthogonalisation to suppress the backdoor while preserving refusal‑related representations. The method requires no clean reference model or original poisoned data and achieves the lowest attack success rate and minimal impact on model performance across multiple model families and attack types.
By Minoo Kim, Vasileios Lampos, George Drayson