知识蒸馏中藏有隐蔽后门,学生模型会被悄悄操控。
Taught Well Learned Ill: Towards Distillation-conditional Backdoor Attack
- 将蒸馏过程建模为双层优化,通过代理学生模型反推教师模型的恶意注入
- 在多个数据集和模型上成功激活后门,且蒸馏数据干净仍可触发
- 方法隐蔽性强,能绕过现有检测手段,适合研究安全蒸馏的学者
知识蒸馏(KD)是将大型教师模型的知识迁移到轻量级学生模型的重要技术,适用于资源受限设备部署。尽管第三方平台的教师模型可能经过安全验证(如后门检测),我们发现了一种新型关键威胁:蒸馏条件后门攻击(DCBA)。DCBA 在教师模型中植入休眠且难以检测的后门,这些后门在知识蒸馏过程中被激活,即使使用干净的蒸馏数据也能影响学生模型。现有方法无法有效实现此类攻击,我们通过将攻击建模为双层优化问题,提出简单而有效的方案(即 SCAR)。内层优化模拟蒸馏过程,通过优化代理学生模型;外层优化利用该代理的输出来优化教师模型以植入条件后门。SCAR采用隐式微分算法,并结合预优化的触发注入函数,有效解决复杂优化问题。大量实验在多种数据集、模型架构和蒸馏技术下验证了 SCAR 的有效性及其对现有后门检测的鲁棒性,揭示了知识蒸馏过程中的重大但此前被忽视的安全漏洞。代码已公开于 https://github.com/WhitolfChen/SCAR。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a vital technique for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained devices by transferring knowledge from large teacher models to lightweight student models. While teacher models from third-party platforms may undergo security verification (\eg, backdoor detection), we uncover a novel and critical threat: distillation-conditional backdoor attacks (DCBAs). DCBA injects dormant and undetectable backdoors into teacher models, which become activated in student models via the KD process, even with clean distillation datasets. While the direct extension of existing methods is ineffective for DCBA, we implement this attack by formulating it as a bilevel optimization problem and proposing a simple yet effective method (\ie, SCAR). Specifically, the inner optimization simulates the KD process by optimizing a surrogate student model, while the outer optimization leverages outputs from this surrogate to optimize the teacher model for implanting the conditional backdoor. Our SCAR addresses this complex optimization utilizing an implicit differentiation algorithm with a pre-optimized trigger injection function. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, model architectures, and KD techniques validate the effectiveness of our SCAR and its resistance against existing backdoor detection, highlighting a significant yet previously overlooked vulnerability in the KD process. Our code is available at https://github.com/WhitolfChen/SCAR.
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