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Main Authors: Chew, Oscar, Lu, Po-Yi, Lin, Jayden, Huang, Kuan-Hao, Lin, Hsuan-Tien
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16830
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author Chew, Oscar
Lu, Po-Yi
Lin, Jayden
Huang, Kuan-Hao
Lin, Hsuan-Tien
author_facet Chew, Oscar
Lu, Po-Yi
Lin, Jayden
Huang, Kuan-Hao
Lin, Hsuan-Tien
contents Recent studies show that text to image (T2I) diffusion models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a trigger in the input prompt can steer generation toward harmful or unintended content. Beyond the trigger token itself, backdoor effects can spread to neighboring tokens in the text embedding space. To address this, we introduce PEPPER (PErcePtion Guided PERturbation), a backdoor defense that rewrites the caption into a semantically distant yet visually similar caption while adding unobstructive elements. With this rewriting strategy, PEPPER disrupt the trigger embedded in the input prompt, dilute the influence of trigger tokens and thereby achieve enhanced robustness. Experiments show that PEPPER is particularly effective against text encoder based attacks, substantially reducing attack success while preserving generation quality. Beyond this, PEPPER can be paired with any existing defenses yielding consistently stronger and generalizable robustness than any standalone method. Our code will be released on Github.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_16830
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PEPPER: Perception-Guided Perturbation for Robust Backdoor Defense in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Chew, Oscar
Lu, Po-Yi
Lin, Jayden
Huang, Kuan-Hao
Lin, Hsuan-Tien
Computation and Language
Recent studies show that text to image (T2I) diffusion models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a trigger in the input prompt can steer generation toward harmful or unintended content. Beyond the trigger token itself, backdoor effects can spread to neighboring tokens in the text embedding space. To address this, we introduce PEPPER (PErcePtion Guided PERturbation), a backdoor defense that rewrites the caption into a semantically distant yet visually similar caption while adding unobstructive elements. With this rewriting strategy, PEPPER disrupt the trigger embedded in the input prompt, dilute the influence of trigger tokens and thereby achieve enhanced robustness. Experiments show that PEPPER is particularly effective against text encoder based attacks, substantially reducing attack success while preserving generation quality. Beyond this, PEPPER can be paired with any existing defenses yielding consistently stronger and generalizable robustness than any standalone method. Our code will be released on Github.
title PEPPER: Perception-Guided Perturbation for Robust Backdoor Defense in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16830