Boosting Backdoor Attack with A Learnable Poisoning Sample Selection
  Strategy
Zihao Zhu Mingda Zhang Shaokui Wei Li Shen Yanbo Fan Baoyuan Wu
Data-poisoning based backdoor attacks aim to insert backdoor into models by
manipulating training datasets without controlling the training process of the
target model. Existing attack methods mainly focus on designing triggers or
fusion strategies between triggers and benign samples. However, they often
randomly select samples to be poisoned, disregarding the varying importance of
each poisoning sample in terms of backdoor injection. A recent selection
strategy filters a fixed-size poisoning sample pool by recording forgetting
events, but it fails to consider the remaining samples outside the pool from a
global perspective. Moreover, computing forgetting events requires significant
additional computing resources. Therefore, how to efficiently and effectively
select poisoning samples from the entire dataset is an urgent problem in
backdoor attacks.To address it, firstly, we introduce a poisoning mask into the
regular backdoor training loss. We suppose that a backdoored model training
with hard poisoning samples has a more backdoor effect on easy ones, which can
be implemented by hindering the normal training process (\ie, maximizing loss
\wrt mask). To further integrate it with normal training process, we then
propose a learnable poisoning sample selection strategy to learn the mask
together with the model parameters through a min-max optimization.Specifically,
the outer loop aims to achieve the backdoor attack goal by minimizing the loss
based on the selected samples, while the inner loop selects hard poisoning
samples that impede this goal by maximizing the loss. After several rounds of
adversarial training, we finally select effective poisoning samples with high
contribution. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the
effectiveness and efficiency of our approach in boosting backdoor attack
performance.