Indiscriminate Data Poisoning Attacks on Pre-trained Feature Extractors
Yiwei Lu Matthew Y. R. Yang Gautam Kamath Yaoliang Yu
Machine learning models have achieved great success in supervised learning
tasks for end-to-end training, which requires a large amount of labeled data
that is not always feasible. Recently, many practitioners have shifted to
self-supervised learning methods that utilize cheap unlabeled data to learn a
general feature extractor via pre-training, which can be further applied to
personalized downstream tasks by simply training an additional linear layer
with limited labeled data. However, such a process may also raise concerns
regarding data poisoning attacks. For instance, indiscriminate data poisoning
attacks, which aim to decrease model utility by injecting a small number of
poisoned data into the training set, pose a security risk to machine learning
models, but have only been studied for end-to-end supervised learning. In this
paper, we extend the exploration of the threat of indiscriminate attacks on
downstream tasks that apply pre-trained feature extractors. Specifically, we
propose two types of attacks: (1) the input space attacks, where we modify
existing attacks to directly craft poisoned data in the input space. However,
due to the difficulty of optimization under constraints, we further propose (2)
the feature targeted attacks, where we mitigate the challenge with three
stages, firstly acquiring target parameters for the linear head; secondly
finding poisoned features by treating the learned feature representations as a
dataset; and thirdly inverting the poisoned features back to the input space.
Our experiments examine such attacks in popular downstream tasks of fine-tuning
on the same dataset and transfer learning that considers domain adaptation.
Empirical results reveal that transfer learning is more vulnerable to our
attacks. Additionally, input space attacks are a strong threat if no
countermeasures are posed, but are otherwise weaker than feature targeted
attacks.