English

WaNet -- Imperceptible Warping-based Backdoor Attack

Cryptography and Security 2021-03-05 v4 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

With the thriving of deep learning and the widespread practice of using pre-trained networks, backdoor attacks have become an increasing security threat drawing many research interests in recent years. A third-party model can be poisoned in training to work well in normal conditions but behave maliciously when a trigger pattern appears. However, the existing backdoor attacks are all built on noise perturbation triggers, making them noticeable to humans. In this paper, we instead propose using warping-based triggers. The proposed backdoor outperforms the previous methods in a human inspection test by a wide margin, proving its stealthiness. To make such models undetectable by machine defenders, we propose a novel training mode, called the ``noise mode. The trained networks successfully attack and bypass the state-of-the-art defense methods on standard classification datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10, GTSRB, and CelebA. Behavior analyses show that our backdoors are transparent to network inspection, further proving this novel attack mechanism's efficiency.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.10369,
  title  = {WaNet -- Imperceptible Warping-based Backdoor Attack},
  author = {Anh Nguyen and Anh Tran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.10369},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to ICLR 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:21:24.019Z