Filter, Obstruct and Dilute: Defending Against Backdoor Attacks on Semi-Supervised Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Xinrui, Geng, Chuanxing, Wan, Wenhai, Li, Shao-yuan, Chen, Songcan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Xinrui
Geng, Chuanxing
Wan, Wenhai
Li, Shao-yuan
Chen, Songcan
author_facet Wang, Xinrui
Geng, Chuanxing
Wan, Wenhai
Li, Shao-yuan
Chen, Songcan
contents Recent studies have verified that semi-supervised learning (SSL) is vulnerable to data poisoning backdoor attacks. Even a tiny fraction of contaminated training data is sufficient for adversaries to manipulate up to 90\% of the test outputs in existing SSL methods. Given the emerging threat of backdoor attacks designed for SSL, this work aims to protect SSL against such risks, marking it as one of the few known efforts in this area. Specifically, we begin by identifying that the spurious correlations between the backdoor triggers and the target class implanted by adversaries are the primary cause of manipulated model predictions during the test phase. To disrupt these correlations, we utilize three key techniques: Gaussian Filter, complementary learning and trigger mix-up, which collectively filter, obstruct and dilute the influence of backdoor attacks in both data pre-processing and feature learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, Backdoor Invalidator (BI), significantly reduces the average attack success rate from 84.7\% to 1.8\% across different state-of-the-art backdoor attacks. It is also worth mentioning that BI does not sacrifice accuracy on clean data and is supported by a theoretical guarantee of its generalization capability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05755
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Filter, Obstruct and Dilute: Defending Against Backdoor Attacks on Semi-Supervised Learning
Wang, Xinrui
Geng, Chuanxing
Wan, Wenhai
Li, Shao-yuan
Chen, Songcan
Machine Learning
Recent studies have verified that semi-supervised learning (SSL) is vulnerable to data poisoning backdoor attacks. Even a tiny fraction of contaminated training data is sufficient for adversaries to manipulate up to 90\% of the test outputs in existing SSL methods. Given the emerging threat of backdoor attacks designed for SSL, this work aims to protect SSL against such risks, marking it as one of the few known efforts in this area. Specifically, we begin by identifying that the spurious correlations between the backdoor triggers and the target class implanted by adversaries are the primary cause of manipulated model predictions during the test phase. To disrupt these correlations, we utilize three key techniques: Gaussian Filter, complementary learning and trigger mix-up, which collectively filter, obstruct and dilute the influence of backdoor attacks in both data pre-processing and feature learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, Backdoor Invalidator (BI), significantly reduces the average attack success rate from 84.7\% to 1.8\% across different state-of-the-art backdoor attacks. It is also worth mentioning that BI does not sacrifice accuracy on clean data and is supported by a theoretical guarantee of its generalization capability.
title Filter, Obstruct and Dilute: Defending Against Backdoor Attacks on Semi-Supervised Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05755