Trigger without Trace: Towards Stealthy Backdoor Attack on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Jie, Wang, Zhongqi, Shan, Shiguang, Chen, Xilin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Jie
Wang, Zhongqi
Shan, Shiguang
Chen, Xilin
author_facet Zhang, Jie
Wang, Zhongqi
Shan, Shiguang
Chen, Xilin
contents Backdoor attacks targeting text-to-image diffusion models have advanced rapidly. However, current backdoor samples often exhibit two key abnormalities compared to benign samples: 1) Semantic Consistency, where backdoor prompts tend to generate images with similar semantic content even with significant textual variations to the prompts; 2) Attention Consistency, where the trigger induces consistent structural responses in the cross-attention maps. These consistencies leave detectable traces for defenders, making backdoors easier to identify. In this paper, toward stealthy backdoor samples, we propose Trigger without Trace (TwT) by explicitly mitigating these consistencies. Specifically, our approach leverages syntactic structures as backdoor triggers to amplify the sensitivity to textual variations, effectively breaking down the semantic consistency. Besides, a regularization method based on Kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy (KMMD) is proposed to align the distribution of cross-attention responses between backdoor and benign samples, thereby disrupting attention consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a 97.5% attack success rate while exhibiting stronger resistance to defenses. It achieves an average of over 98% backdoor samples bypassing three state-of-the-art detection mechanisms, revealing the vulnerabilities of current backdoor defense methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Robin-WZQ/TwT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_17724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Trigger without Trace: Towards Stealthy Backdoor Attack on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Zhang, Jie
Wang, Zhongqi
Shan, Shiguang
Chen, Xilin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Backdoor attacks targeting text-to-image diffusion models have advanced rapidly. However, current backdoor samples often exhibit two key abnormalities compared to benign samples: 1) Semantic Consistency, where backdoor prompts tend to generate images with similar semantic content even with significant textual variations to the prompts; 2) Attention Consistency, where the trigger induces consistent structural responses in the cross-attention maps. These consistencies leave detectable traces for defenders, making backdoors easier to identify. In this paper, toward stealthy backdoor samples, we propose Trigger without Trace (TwT) by explicitly mitigating these consistencies. Specifically, our approach leverages syntactic structures as backdoor triggers to amplify the sensitivity to textual variations, effectively breaking down the semantic consistency. Besides, a regularization method based on Kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy (KMMD) is proposed to align the distribution of cross-attention responses between backdoor and benign samples, thereby disrupting attention consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a 97.5% attack success rate while exhibiting stronger resistance to defenses. It achieves an average of over 98% backdoor samples bypassing three state-of-the-art detection mechanisms, revealing the vulnerabilities of current backdoor defense methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Robin-WZQ/TwT.
title Trigger without Trace: Towards Stealthy Backdoor Attack on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17724