NeurIPS2025
A Set of Generalized Components to Achieve Effective Poison-only Clean-label Backdoor Attacks with Collaborative Sample Selection and Triggers
Zhixiao Wu, Yao Lu, Jie Wen, Hao Sun, Qi Zhou, Guangming Lu
Abstract
Poison-only Clean-label Backdoor Attacks (PCBAs) aim to covertly inject attackerdesired behavior into DNNs by merely poisoning the dataset without changing the labels. To effectively implant a backdoor, multiple triggers are proposed for various attack requirements of Attack Success Rate (ASR) and stealthiness. Additionally, sample selection enhances clean-label backdoor attacks' ASR by meticulously selecting "hard" samples instead of random samples to poison. Current methods, however, 1) usually handle the sample selection and triggers in isolation, leading to limited performance on both ASR and stealthiness when converted to PCBAs. Therefore, we seek to explore the bi-directional collaborative relations between the sample selection and triggers to address the above dilemma. 2) Since the strong specificity within triggers, the simple combination of sample selection and triggers fails to flexibly and generally mitigate the drawback of various backdoor attacks. Therefore, we seek to propose a set of components based on the commonalities of attacks. Specifically, Component A ascertains two critical selection factors, and then makes them an appropriate combination based on the trigger scale to select more reasonable "hard" samples for improving ASR. Component B is proposed to select samples with similarities to relevant trigger implanted samples to promote stealthiness. Component C reassigns trigger poisoning intensity on RGB colors through distinct sensitivity of the human visual system to RGB for higher ASR, with stealthiness ensured by sample selection including Component B. Furthermore, all components can be strategically integrated into diverse PCBAs, enabling tailored solutions that balance ASR and stealthiness enhancement for specific attack requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our components in stealthiness, ASR, and generalization. Our code can be seen at https://github.com/HITSZ-wzx/GeneralComponents.git .