A Survey on Backdoor Attack and Defense in Natural Language Processing

Deep learning is becoming increasingly popular in real-life applications, especially in natural language processing (NLP). Users often choose training outsourcing or adopt third-party data and models due to data and computation resources being limited. In such a situation, training data and models are exposed to the public. As a result, attackers can manipulate the training process to inject some triggers into the model, which is called backdoor attack. Backdoor attack is quite stealthy and difficult to be detected because it has little inferior influence on the model's performance for the clean samples. To get a precise grasp and understanding of this problem, in this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review of backdoor attacks and defenses in the field of NLP. Besides, we summarize benchmark datasets and point out the open issues to design credible systems to defend against backdoor attacks.Comment: 12 pages, QRS202

Backdoor Learning for NLP: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

Although backdoor learning is an active research topic in the NLP domain, the literature lacks studies that systematically categorize and summarize backdoor attacks and defenses. To bridge the gap, we present a comprehensive and unifying study of backdoor learning for NLP by summarizing the literature in a systematic manner. We first present and motivate the importance of backdoor learning for building robust NLP systems. Next, we provide a thorough account of backdoor attack techniques, their applications, defenses against backdoor attacks, and various mitigation techniques to remove backdoor attacks. We then provide a detailed review and analysis of evaluation metrics, benchmark datasets, threat models, and challenges related to backdoor learning in NLP. Ultimately, our work aims to crystallize and contextualize the landscape of existing literature in backdoor learning for the text domain and motivate further research in the field. To this end, we identify troubling gaps in the literature and offer insights and ideas into open challenges and future research directions. Finally, we provide a GitHub repository with a list of backdoor learning papers that will be continuously updated at https://github.com/marwanomar1/Backdoor-Learning-for-NLP

Backdoor Attacks and Countermeasures in Natural Language Processing Models: A Comprehensive Security Review

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have led to unprecedented progress in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Owing to limited data and computation resources, using third-party data and models has become a new paradigm for adapting various tasks. However, research shows that it has some potential security vulnerabilities because attackers can manipulate the training process and data source. Such a way can set specific triggers, making the model exhibit expected behaviors that have little inferior influence on the model's performance for primitive tasks, called backdoor attacks. Hence, it could have dire consequences, especially considering that the backdoor attack surfaces are broad. To get a precise grasp and understanding of this problem, a systematic and comprehensive review is required to confront various security challenges from different phases and attack purposes. Additionally, there is a dearth of analysis and comparison of the various emerging backdoor countermeasures in this situation. In this paper, we conduct a timely review of backdoor attacks and countermeasures to sound the red alarm for the NLP security community. According to the affected stage of the machine learning pipeline, the attack surfaces are recognized to be wide and then formalized into three categorizations: attacking pre-trained model with fine-tuning (APMF) or prompt-tuning (APMP), and attacking final model with training (AFMT), where AFMT can be subdivided into different attack aims. Thus, attacks under each categorization are combed. The countermeasures are categorized into two general classes: sample inspection and model inspection. Overall, the research on the defense side is far behind the attack side, and there is no single defense that can prevent all types of backdoor attacks. An attacker can intelligently bypass existing defenses with a more invisible attack. ......Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure

Hiding Backdoors within Event Sequence Data via Poisoning Attacks

The financial industry relies on deep learning models for making important decisions. This adoption brings new danger, as deep black-box models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In computer vision, one can shape the output during inference by performing an adversarial attack called poisoning via introducing a backdoor into the model during training. For sequences of financial transactions of a customer, insertion of a backdoor is harder to perform, as models operate over a more complex discrete space of sequences, and systematic checks for insecurities occur. We provide a method to introduce concealed backdoors, creating vulnerabilities without altering their functionality for uncontaminated data. To achieve this, we replace a clean model with a poisoned one that is aware of the availability of a backdoor and utilize this knowledge. Our most difficult for uncovering attacks include either additional supervised detection step of poisoned data activated during the test or well-hidden model weight modifications. The experimental study provides insights into how these effects vary across different datasets, architectures, and model components. Alternative methods and baselines, such as distillation-type regularization, are also explored but found to be less efficient. Conducted on three open transaction datasets and architectures, including LSTM, CNN, and Transformer, our findings not only illuminate the vulnerabilities in contemporary models but also can drive the construction of more robust systems