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Neural Network Backdoor Attacks Fully Controlled by Composite Natural Utterance Fragments

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Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2023)

Abstract

Since the popularity of deep neural networks, NLP models have played an increasingly important role in our lives and work. However, along with the widespread use of NLP models, backdoor attacks against NLP models have shown to be increasingly damaging, which can have extremely serious consequences. Backdoor attacks are generally used to implant backdoors into models by compromising the training phase, and then triggered by triggers in the inference phase to make the backdoored models exhibit abnormal behaviour. In this paper, we propose two backdoor attack methods that controlled by composite triggers, Enhanced Backdoor Attack (EBA) and Trigger Frequency Controlled Backdoor Attack (TFCBA), which extend the threatening nature of backdoor attacks by using composite natural utterance fragments as triggers, and they eliminate the shortcomings of currently proposed backdoor attacks such as triggers being easily used accidentally, the single function of the attack, and the over-association of trigger patches with the target class. We have experimentally evaluated our proposed attacks in multiple NLP task scenarios, and the experimental results demonstrate excellent feasibility and effectiveness.

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Correspondence to Linsen Li .

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Yang, X., Li, L., Chen, Y. (2023). Neural Network Backdoor Attacks Fully Controlled by Composite Natural Utterance Fragments. In: Wang, D., Yung, M., Liu, Z., Chen, X. (eds) Information and Communications Security. ICICS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14252. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7356-9_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7356-9_27

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-7356-9

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