Backdoor Sentinel: Detecting and Detoxifying Backdoors in Diffusion Models via Temporal Noise Consistency

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Bingzheng, Gu, Xiaoyan, Xu, Hongbo, Li, Hongcheng, Yu, Zimo, Zhou, Jiang, Wang, Weiping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wang, Bingzheng
Gu, Xiaoyan
Xu, Hongbo
Li, Hongcheng
Yu, Zimo
Zhou, Jiang
Wang, Weiping
author_facet Wang, Bingzheng
Gu, Xiaoyan
Xu, Hongbo
Li, Hongcheng
Yu, Zimo
Zhou, Jiang
Wang, Weiping
contents Diffusion models have been widely deployed in AIGC services; however, their reliance on opaque training data and procedures exposes a broad attack surface for backdoor injection. In practical auditing scenarios, due to the protection of intellectual property and commercial confidentiality, auditors are typically unable to access model parameters, rendering existing white-box or query-intensive detection methods impractical. More importantly, even after the backdoor is detected, existing detoxification approaches are often trapped in a dilemma between detoxification effectiveness and generation quality. In this work, we identify a previously unreported phenomenon called temporal noise unconsistency, where the noise predictions between adjacent diffusion timesteps is disrupted in specific temporal segments when the input is triggered, while remaining stable under clean inputs. Leveraging this finding, we propose Temporal Noise Consistency Defense (TNC-Defense), a unified framework for backdoor detection and detoxification. The framework first uses the adjacent timestep noise consistency to design a gray-box detection module, for identifying and locating anomalous diffusion timesteps. Furthermore, the framework uses the identified anomalous timesteps to construct a trigger-agnostic, timestep-aware detoxification module, which directly corrects the backdoor generation path. This effectively suppresses backdoor behavior while significantly reducing detoxification costs. We evaluate the proposed method under five representative backdoor attack scenarios and compare it with state-of-the-art defenses. The results show that TNC-Defense improves the average detection accuracy by $11\%$ with negligible additional overhead, and invalidates an average of $98.5\%$ of triggered samples with only a mild degradation in generation quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_01765
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Backdoor Sentinel: Detecting and Detoxifying Backdoors in Diffusion Models via Temporal Noise Consistency
Wang, Bingzheng
Gu, Xiaoyan
Xu, Hongbo
Li, Hongcheng
Yu, Zimo
Zhou, Jiang
Wang, Weiping
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Diffusion models have been widely deployed in AIGC services; however, their reliance on opaque training data and procedures exposes a broad attack surface for backdoor injection. In practical auditing scenarios, due to the protection of intellectual property and commercial confidentiality, auditors are typically unable to access model parameters, rendering existing white-box or query-intensive detection methods impractical. More importantly, even after the backdoor is detected, existing detoxification approaches are often trapped in a dilemma between detoxification effectiveness and generation quality. In this work, we identify a previously unreported phenomenon called temporal noise unconsistency, where the noise predictions between adjacent diffusion timesteps is disrupted in specific temporal segments when the input is triggered, while remaining stable under clean inputs. Leveraging this finding, we propose Temporal Noise Consistency Defense (TNC-Defense), a unified framework for backdoor detection and detoxification. The framework first uses the adjacent timestep noise consistency to design a gray-box detection module, for identifying and locating anomalous diffusion timesteps. Furthermore, the framework uses the identified anomalous timesteps to construct a trigger-agnostic, timestep-aware detoxification module, which directly corrects the backdoor generation path. This effectively suppresses backdoor behavior while significantly reducing detoxification costs. We evaluate the proposed method under five representative backdoor attack scenarios and compare it with state-of-the-art defenses. The results show that TNC-Defense improves the average detection accuracy by $11\%$ with negligible additional overhead, and invalidates an average of $98.5\%$ of triggered samples with only a mild degradation in generation quality.
title Backdoor Sentinel: Detecting and Detoxifying Backdoors in Diffusion Models via Temporal Noise Consistency
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01765