Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Wang, Bo, Ni, Jia, Zhao, Mengnan, Qin, Zhan, Ren, Kui
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05224
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909019543699456
author Wang, Bo
Ni, Jia
Zhao, Mengnan
Qin, Zhan
Ren, Kui
author_facet Wang, Bo
Ni, Jia
Zhao, Mengnan
Qin, Zhan
Ren, Kui
contents The unauthorized use of personal data in model training has emerged as a growing privacy threat. Unlearnable examples (UEs) address this issue by embedding imperceptible perturbations into benign examples to obstruct feature learning. However, existing studies mainly evaluate UEs under from-scratch training settings, leaving their behavior under the widely adopted pretraining-finetuning (PF) paradigm largely unexplored. In this work, we provide the first systematic investigation of unlearnable examples across diverse training paradigms. Our analysis reveals that loading and freezing pretrained weights significantly weakens the effectiveness of existing UEs methods. We further explain these findings through semantic filtering: while UEs tend to induce models to overfit non-semantic noise, thereby weakening their semantic extraction capabilities, under the PF paradigm, frozen shallow layers preserve data semantics, effectively filtering out distracting information like unlearnable noise. Guided by these insights, we propose a hierarchical deception strategy, Shallow Semantic Camouflage (SSC), that confines the generation process to a semantically valid subspace, aiming to bypass the semantic suppression introduced by pretrained weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently preserves data unlearnability even under challenging training paradigms, such as shallow-layer freezing and semantic-focused pretraining (SF-Pretrain), bridging the critical gap in pretrain-based unlearnable learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_05224
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Channel-Level Semantic Perturbations: Unlearnable Examples for Diverse Training Paradigms
Wang, Bo
Ni, Jia
Zhao, Mengnan
Qin, Zhan
Ren, Kui
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
The unauthorized use of personal data in model training has emerged as a growing privacy threat. Unlearnable examples (UEs) address this issue by embedding imperceptible perturbations into benign examples to obstruct feature learning. However, existing studies mainly evaluate UEs under from-scratch training settings, leaving their behavior under the widely adopted pretraining-finetuning (PF) paradigm largely unexplored. In this work, we provide the first systematic investigation of unlearnable examples across diverse training paradigms. Our analysis reveals that loading and freezing pretrained weights significantly weakens the effectiveness of existing UEs methods. We further explain these findings through semantic filtering: while UEs tend to induce models to overfit non-semantic noise, thereby weakening their semantic extraction capabilities, under the PF paradigm, frozen shallow layers preserve data semantics, effectively filtering out distracting information like unlearnable noise. Guided by these insights, we propose a hierarchical deception strategy, Shallow Semantic Camouflage (SSC), that confines the generation process to a semantically valid subspace, aiming to bypass the semantic suppression introduced by pretrained weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently preserves data unlearnability even under challenging training paradigms, such as shallow-layer freezing and semantic-focused pretraining (SF-Pretrain), bridging the critical gap in pretrain-based unlearnable learning.
title Channel-Level Semantic Perturbations: Unlearnable Examples for Diverse Training Paradigms
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05224