First-Order Efficient General-Purpose Clean-Label Data Poisoning

As one of the recently emerged threats to Deep Learning (DL) models, clean-label data poisoning can teach DL models to make wrong predictions on specific target data, such as images or network traffic packets, by injecting a small set of poisoning data with clean labels into the training datasets. Although several clean-label poisoning methods have been developed before, they have two main limitations. First, the methods developed with bi-level optimization or influence functions usually require second-order information, leading to substantial computational overhead. Second, the methods based on feature collision are not very transferable to unseen feature spaces or generalizable to various scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a first-order efficient general-purpose clean-label poisoning attack in this paper. In our attack, we first identify the first-order model update that can push the model towards predicting the target data as the attack targeted label. We then formulate a necessary condition based on the model update and other first-order information to optimize the poisoning data. Theoretically, we prove that our first-order poisoning method is an approximation of a second-order approach with theoretically-guaranteed performance. Empirically, extensive evaluations on image classification and network traffic classification demonstrate the outstanding efficiency, transferability, and generalizability of our poisoning method.