Shortcuts Arising from Contrast: Effective and Covert Clean-Label
  Attacks in Prompt-Based Learning
Xiaopeng Xie Ming Yan Xiwen Zhou Chenlong Zhao Suli Wang Yong Zhang Joey Tianyi Zhou
Prompt-based learning paradigm has demonstrated remarkable efficacy in
enhancing the adaptability of pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly
in few-shot scenarios. However, this learning paradigm has been shown to be
vulnerable to backdoor attacks. The current clean-label attack, employing a
specific prompt as a trigger, can achieve success without the need for external
triggers and ensure correct labeling of poisoned samples, which is more
stealthy compared to the poisoned-label attack, but on the other hand, it faces
significant issues with false activations and poses greater challenges,
necessitating a higher rate of poisoning. Using conventional negative data
augmentation methods, we discovered that it is challenging to trade off between
effectiveness and stealthiness in a clean-label setting. In addressing this
issue, we are inspired by the notion that a backdoor acts as a shortcut and
posit that this shortcut stems from the contrast between the trigger and the
data utilized for poisoning. In this study, we propose a method named
Contrastive Shortcut Injection (CSI), by leveraging activation values,
integrates trigger design and data selection strategies to craft stronger
shortcut features. With extensive experiments on full-shot and few-shot text
classification tasks, we empirically validate CSI's high effectiveness and high
stealthiness at low poisoning rates. Notably, we found that the two approaches
play leading roles in full-shot and few-shot settings, respectively.