MixBridge: Heterogeneous Image-to-Image Backdoor Attack through Mixture of Schrödinger Bridges

This paper focuses on implanting multiple heterogeneous backdoor triggers in bridge-based diffusion models designed for complex and arbitrary input distributions. Existing backdoor formulations mainly address single-attack scenarios and are limited to Gaussian noise input models. To fill this gap, we propose MixBridge, a novel diffusion Schrödinger bridge (DSB) framework to cater to arbitrary input distributions (taking I2I tasks as special cases). Beyond this trait, we demonstrate that backdoor triggers can be injected into MixBridge by directly training with poisoned image pairs. This eliminates the need for the cumbersome modifications to stochastic differential equations required in previous studies, providing a flexible tool to study backdoor behavior for bridge models. However, a key question arises: can a single DSB model train multiple backdoor triggers? Unfortunately, our theory shows that when attempting this, the model ends up following the geometric mean of benign and backdoored distributions, leading to performance conflict across backdoor tasks. To overcome this, we propose a Divide-and-Merge strategy to mix different bridges, where models are independently pre-trained for each specific objective (Divide) and then integrated into a unified model (Merge). In addition, a Weight Reallocation Scheme (WRS) is also designed to enhance the stealthiness of MixBridge. Empirical studies across diverse generation tasks speak to