Spectral Signatures in Backdoor Attacks

Understand

A recent line of work has uncovered a new form of data poisoning: so-called \emph{backdoor} attacks.

• These attacks are particularly dangerous because they do not affect a network's behavior on typical, benign data.
• Rather, the network only deviates from its expected output when triggered by a perturbation planted by an adversary.
• In this paper, we identify a new property of all known backdoor attacks, which we call \emph{spectral signatures}.