LFPD: Local-Feature-Powered Defense against adaptive backdoor attacks

Guo, Wei;Demontis, Ambra;Pintor, Maura;Chan, Patrick P. K.;Biggio, Battista

2025-01-01

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Abstract

To detect the suspect poisoned data in the training phase, most backdoor defenses rely on a prevalent assumption, i.e., the feature separability between poisoned and benign samples. However, this assumption can be bypassed by novel adaptive attacks, which merge the features of poisoned and benign samples. In this paper, we contrast these adaptive attacks and propose a so-called Local-Feature-Powered Defense (LFPD), which leverages a local feature algorithm to measure samples' similarity in the image space and uses it to guide the training process to increase the feature sepa-rability between poisoned and benign samples. Then, our LFPD detects the outliers in the training dataset as poisoned samples and removes the backdoor by unlearning them. Finally, we compare our LFPD with five existing defenses, and our experimental results demonstrate that LFPD outperforms them in defending against adaptive attacks.