Practical, Generalizable and Robust Backdoor Attacks on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dai, Haoran, Wang, Jiawen, Yang, Ruo, Sharma, Manali, Liao, Zhonghao, Hong, Yuan, Wang, Binghui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dai, Haoran
Wang, Jiawen
Yang, Ruo
Sharma, Manali
Liao, Zhonghao
Hong, Yuan
Wang, Binghui
author_facet Dai, Haoran
Wang, Jiawen
Yang, Ruo
Sharma, Manali
Liao, Zhonghao
Hong, Yuan
Wang, Binghui
contents Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs) have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality and diverse images from text prompts, yet recent studies have revealed their vulnerability to backdoor attacks. Existing attack methods suffer from critical limitations: 1) they rely on unnatural adversarial prompts that lack human readability and require massive poisoned data; 2) their effectiveness is typically restricted to specific models, lacking generalizability; and 3) they can be mitigated by recent backdoor defenses. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel backdoor attack framework that achieves three key properties: 1) \emph{Practicality}: Our attack requires only a few stealthy backdoor samples to generate arbitrary attacker-chosen target images, as well as ensuring high-quality image generation in benign scenarios. 2) \emph{Generalizability:} The attack is applicable across multiple T2I DMs without requiring model-specific redesign. 3) \emph{Robustness:} The attack remains effective against existing backdoor defenses and adaptive defenses. Our extensive experimental results on multiple T2I DMs demonstrate that with only 10 carefully crafted backdoored samples, our attack method achieves $>$90\% attack success rate with negligible degradation in benign image generation quality. We also conduct human evaluation to validate our attack effectiveness. Furthermore, recent backdoor detection and mitigation methods, as well as adaptive defense tailored to our attack are not sufficiently effective, highlighting the pressing need for more robust defense mechanisms against the proposed attack.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01605
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Practical, Generalizable and Robust Backdoor Attacks on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Dai, Haoran
Wang, Jiawen
Yang, Ruo
Sharma, Manali
Liao, Zhonghao
Hong, Yuan
Wang, Binghui
Cryptography and Security
Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs) have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality and diverse images from text prompts, yet recent studies have revealed their vulnerability to backdoor attacks. Existing attack methods suffer from critical limitations: 1) they rely on unnatural adversarial prompts that lack human readability and require massive poisoned data; 2) their effectiveness is typically restricted to specific models, lacking generalizability; and 3) they can be mitigated by recent backdoor defenses. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel backdoor attack framework that achieves three key properties: 1) \emph{Practicality}: Our attack requires only a few stealthy backdoor samples to generate arbitrary attacker-chosen target images, as well as ensuring high-quality image generation in benign scenarios. 2) \emph{Generalizability:} The attack is applicable across multiple T2I DMs without requiring model-specific redesign. 3) \emph{Robustness:} The attack remains effective against existing backdoor defenses and adaptive defenses. Our extensive experimental results on multiple T2I DMs demonstrate that with only 10 carefully crafted backdoored samples, our attack method achieves $>$90\% attack success rate with negligible degradation in benign image generation quality. We also conduct human evaluation to validate our attack effectiveness. Furthermore, recent backdoor detection and mitigation methods, as well as adaptive defense tailored to our attack are not sufficiently effective, highlighting the pressing need for more robust defense mechanisms against the proposed attack.
title Practical, Generalizable and Robust Backdoor Attacks on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01605