Rethinking Backdoor Detection Evaluation for Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yan, Jun, Mo, Wenjie Jacky, Ren, Xiang, Jia, Robin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Yan, Jun
Mo, Wenjie Jacky
Ren, Xiang
Jia, Robin
author_facet Yan, Jun
Mo, Wenjie Jacky
Ren, Xiang
Jia, Robin
contents Backdoor attacks, in which a model behaves maliciously when given an attacker-specified trigger, pose a major security risk for practitioners who depend on publicly released language models. As a countermeasure, backdoor detection methods aim to detect whether a released model contains a backdoor. While existing backdoor detection methods have high accuracy in detecting backdoored models on standard benchmarks, it is unclear whether they can robustly identify backdoors in the wild. In this paper, we examine the robustness of backdoor detectors by manipulating different factors during backdoor planting. We find that the success of existing methods based on trigger inversion or meta classifiers highly depends on how intensely the model is trained on poisoned data. Specifically, backdoors planted with more aggressive or more conservative training are significantly more difficult to detect than the default ones. Our results highlight a lack of robustness of existing backdoor detectors and the limitations in current benchmark construction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_00399
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Backdoor Detection Evaluation for Language Models
Yan, Jun
Mo, Wenjie Jacky
Ren, Xiang
Jia, Robin
Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
Backdoor attacks, in which a model behaves maliciously when given an attacker-specified trigger, pose a major security risk for practitioners who depend on publicly released language models. As a countermeasure, backdoor detection methods aim to detect whether a released model contains a backdoor. While existing backdoor detection methods have high accuracy in detecting backdoored models on standard benchmarks, it is unclear whether they can robustly identify backdoors in the wild. In this paper, we examine the robustness of backdoor detectors by manipulating different factors during backdoor planting. We find that the success of existing methods based on trigger inversion or meta classifiers highly depends on how intensely the model is trained on poisoned data. Specifically, backdoors planted with more aggressive or more conservative training are significantly more difficult to detect than the default ones. Our results highlight a lack of robustness of existing backdoor detectors and the limitations in current benchmark construction.
title Rethinking Backdoor Detection Evaluation for Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00399