NOTABLE: Transferable Backdoor Attacks Against Prompt-based NLP Models
Kai Mei Zheng Li Zhenting Wang Yang Zhang Shiqing Ma
Prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor
attacks against prompt-based models consider injecting backdoors into the
entire embedding layers or word embedding vectors. Such attacks can be easily
affected by retraining on downstream tasks and with different prompting
strategies, limiting the transferability of backdoor attacks. In this work, we
propose transferable backdoor attacks against prompt-based models, called
NOTABLE, which is independent of downstream tasks and prompting strategies.
Specifically, NOTABLE injects backdoors into the encoders of PLMs by utilizing
an adaptive verbalizer to bind triggers to specific words (i.e., anchors). It
activates the backdoor by pasting input with triggers to reach
adversary-desired anchors, achieving independence from downstream tasks and
prompting strategies. We conduct experiments on six NLP tasks, three popular
models, and three prompting strategies. Empirical results show that NOTABLE
achieves superior attack performance (i.e., attack success rate over 90% on all
the datasets), and outperforms two state-of-the-art baselines. Evaluations on
three defenses show the robustness of NOTABLE. Our code can be found at
https://github.com/RU-System-Software-and-Security/Notable.