MergeGuard: Efficient Thwarting of Trojan Attacks in Machine Learning Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shabgahi, Soheil Zibakhsh, Jandali, Yaman, Koushanfar, Farinaz
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shabgahi, Soheil Zibakhsh
Jandali, Yaman
Koushanfar, Farinaz
author_facet Shabgahi, Soheil Zibakhsh
Jandali, Yaman
Koushanfar, Farinaz
contents This paper proposes MergeGuard, a novel methodology for mitigation of AI Trojan attacks. Trojan attacks on AI models cause inputs embedded with triggers to be misclassified to an adversary's target class, posing a significant threat to model usability trained by an untrusted third party. The core of MergeGuard is a new post-training methodology for linearizing and merging fully connected layers which we show simultaneously improves model generalizability and performance. Our Proof of Concept evaluation on Transformer models demonstrates that MergeGuard maintains model accuracy while decreasing trojan attack success rate, outperforming commonly used (post-training) Trojan mitigation by fine-tuning methodologies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_04015
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MergeGuard: Efficient Thwarting of Trojan Attacks in Machine Learning Models
Shabgahi, Soheil Zibakhsh
Jandali, Yaman
Koushanfar, Farinaz
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
This paper proposes MergeGuard, a novel methodology for mitigation of AI Trojan attacks. Trojan attacks on AI models cause inputs embedded with triggers to be misclassified to an adversary's target class, posing a significant threat to model usability trained by an untrusted third party. The core of MergeGuard is a new post-training methodology for linearizing and merging fully connected layers which we show simultaneously improves model generalizability and performance. Our Proof of Concept evaluation on Transformer models demonstrates that MergeGuard maintains model accuracy while decreasing trojan attack success rate, outperforming commonly used (post-training) Trojan mitigation by fine-tuning methodologies.
title MergeGuard: Efficient Thwarting of Trojan Attacks in Machine Learning Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04015