Unified Neural Backdoor Removal with Only Few Clean Samples through Unlearning and Relearning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Min, Nay Myat, Pham, Long H., Sun, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Min, Nay Myat
Pham, Long H.
Sun, Jun
author_facet Min, Nay Myat
Pham, Long H.
Sun, Jun
contents Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success across various applications; however, their vulnerability to backdoor attacks poses severe security risks -- especially in situations where only a limited set of clean samples is available for defense. In this work, we address this critical challenge by proposing ULRL (UnLearn and ReLearn for backdoor removal), a novel two-phase approach for comprehensive backdoor removal. Our method first employs an unlearning phase, in which the network's loss is intentionally maximized on a small clean dataset to expose neurons that are excessively sensitive to backdoor triggers. Subsequently, in the relearning phase, these suspicious neurons are recalibrated using targeted reinitialization and cosine similarity regularization, effectively neutralizing backdoor influences while preserving the model's performance on benign data. Extensive experiments with 12 backdoor types on multiple datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, GTSRB, and Tiny-ImageNet) and architectures (PreAct-ResNet18, VGG19-BN, and ViT-B-16) demonstrate that ULRL significantly reduces the attack success rate without compromising clean accuracy -- even when only 1% of clean data is used for defense.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_14781
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unified Neural Backdoor Removal with Only Few Clean Samples through Unlearning and Relearning
Min, Nay Myat
Pham, Long H.
Sun, Jun
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success across various applications; however, their vulnerability to backdoor attacks poses severe security risks -- especially in situations where only a limited set of clean samples is available for defense. In this work, we address this critical challenge by proposing ULRL (UnLearn and ReLearn for backdoor removal), a novel two-phase approach for comprehensive backdoor removal. Our method first employs an unlearning phase, in which the network's loss is intentionally maximized on a small clean dataset to expose neurons that are excessively sensitive to backdoor triggers. Subsequently, in the relearning phase, these suspicious neurons are recalibrated using targeted reinitialization and cosine similarity regularization, effectively neutralizing backdoor influences while preserving the model's performance on benign data. Extensive experiments with 12 backdoor types on multiple datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, GTSRB, and Tiny-ImageNet) and architectures (PreAct-ResNet18, VGG19-BN, and ViT-B-16) demonstrate that ULRL significantly reduces the attack success rate without compromising clean accuracy -- even when only 1% of clean data is used for defense.
title Unified Neural Backdoor Removal with Only Few Clean Samples through Unlearning and Relearning
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14781