Computation and Data Efficient Backdoor Attacks

Yutong Wu, Xingshuo Han, Han Qiu, Tianwei Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 4805-4814

Backdoor attacks against deep learning have been widely studied. Various attack techniques have been proposed for different domains and paradigms, e.g., image, point cloud, natural language processing, transfer learning, etc. These works normally adopt the data poisoning strategy to embed the backdoor. They randomly select samples from the benign training set for poisoning, without considering the distinct contribution of each sample to the backdoor effectiveness, making the attack less optimal. A recent work (IJCAI-22) proposed to use the forgetting score to measure the importance of each poisoned sample and then filter out redundant data for effective backdoor training. However, this method is empirically designed without theoretical proofing. It is also very time-consuming as it needs to go through almost all the training stages for data selection. To address such limitations, we propose a novel confidence-based scoring methodology, which can efficiently measure the contribution of each poisoning sample based on the distance posteriors. We further introduce a greedy search algorithm to find the most informative samples for backdoor injection more promptly. Experimental evaluations on both 2D image and 3D point cloud classification tasks show that our approach can achieve comparable performance or even surpass the forgetting score-based searching method while requiring only several extra epochs' computation of a standard training process.