Using Interleaved Ensemble Unlearning to Keep Backdoors at Bay for Finetuning Vision Transformers
Keywords: Vision Transformer, Backdoor Defence
TL;DR: We present and evaluate a novel backdoor defence strategy designed specifically for Vision Transformers called Interleaved Ensemble Unlearning.
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become popular in computer vision tasks. Backdoor attacks, which trigger undesirable behaviours in models during inference, threaten ViTs' performance, particularly in security-sensitive tasks. Although backdoor defences have been developed for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), they are less effective for ViTs, and defences tailored to ViTs are scarce. To address this, we present Interleaved Ensemble Unlearning (IEU), a method for finetuning clean ViTs on backdoored datasets. In stage 1, a shallow ViT is finetuned to have high confidence on backdoored data and low confidence on clean data. In stage 2, the shallow ViT acts as a "gate" to block potentially poisoned data from the defended ViT. This data is added to an unlearn set and asynchronously unlearnt via gradient ascent. We demonstrate IEU's effectiveness on three datasets against 11 state-of-the-art backdoor attacks and show its versatility by applying it to different model architectures.
Primary Area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
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Submission Number: 7700
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