Infusion: Shaping Model Behavior by Editing Training Data via Influence Functions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Rosser, J, Kirk, Robert, Grefenstette, Edward, Foerster, Jakob, Ruis, Laura
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Rosser, J
Kirk, Robert
Grefenstette, Edward
Foerster, Jakob
Ruis, Laura
author_facet Rosser, J
Kirk, Robert
Grefenstette, Edward
Foerster, Jakob
Ruis, Laura
contents Influence functions are commonly used to attribute model behavior to training documents. We explore the reverse: crafting training data that induces model behavior. Our framework, Infusion, uses scalable influence-function approximations to compute small perturbations to training documents that induce targeted changes in model behavior through parameter shifts. We evaluate Infusion on data poisoning tasks across vision and language domains. On CIFAR-10, we show that making subtle edits via Infusion to just 0.2% (100/45,000) of the training documents can be competitive with the baseline of inserting a small number of explicit behavior examples. We also find that Infusion transfers across architectures (ResNet $\leftrightarrow$ CNN), suggesting a single poisoned corpus can affect multiple independently trained models. In preliminary language experiments, we characterize when our approach increases the probability of target behaviors and when it fails, finding it most effective at amplifying behaviors the model has already learned. Taken together, these results show that small, subtle edits to training data can systematically shape model behavior, underscoring the importance of training data interpretability for adversaries and defenders alike. We provide the code here: https://github.com/jrosseruk/infusion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_09987
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Infusion: Shaping Model Behavior by Editing Training Data via Influence Functions
Rosser, J
Kirk, Robert
Grefenstette, Edward
Foerster, Jakob
Ruis, Laura
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
68T50
I.2.11
Influence functions are commonly used to attribute model behavior to training documents. We explore the reverse: crafting training data that induces model behavior. Our framework, Infusion, uses scalable influence-function approximations to compute small perturbations to training documents that induce targeted changes in model behavior through parameter shifts. We evaluate Infusion on data poisoning tasks across vision and language domains. On CIFAR-10, we show that making subtle edits via Infusion to just 0.2% (100/45,000) of the training documents can be competitive with the baseline of inserting a small number of explicit behavior examples. We also find that Infusion transfers across architectures (ResNet $\leftrightarrow$ CNN), suggesting a single poisoned corpus can affect multiple independently trained models. In preliminary language experiments, we characterize when our approach increases the probability of target behaviors and when it fails, finding it most effective at amplifying behaviors the model has already learned. Taken together, these results show that small, subtle edits to training data can systematically shape model behavior, underscoring the importance of training data interpretability for adversaries and defenders alike. We provide the code here: https://github.com/jrosseruk/infusion.
title Infusion: Shaping Model Behavior by Editing Training Data via Influence Functions
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
68T50
I.2.11
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09987