When Priors Backfire: On the Vulnerability of Unlearnable Examples to Pretraining

Zhihao Li, Gezheng Xu, Jiale Cai, Ruiyi Fang, Di Wu, Qicheng Lao, Charles Ling, Boyu Wang

Keywords: unlearnable examples, data privacy

Abstract: Unlearnable Examples (UEs) are introduced as a data protection strategy that generates imperceptible perturbations to mislead models into learning spurious correlations rather than real semantics. In this paper, we reveal a fundamental vulnerability of UEs that emerges when learning starts from a pretrained model. Specifically, our empirical analysis shows that even when data are protected by carefully crafted perturbations, pretraining priors still allow the model to bypass the shortcuts introduced by UEs and capture semantic information from the data, thereby nullifying unlearnability. To counter this effect, we propose $\textbf{BAIT}$ ($\textbf{B}$inding $\textbf{A}$rtificial perturbations to $\textbf{I}$ncorrect $\textbf{T}$argets), a novel bi‑level optimization formulation in which the inner level mirrors standard UE objectives, while the outer level enforces a dynamic association of perturbations with incorrect labels, deliberately misleading pretraining priors and preventing them from aligning with true semantics. This mislabel-perturbation binding mechanism blocks the pretrained model from readily establishing the true label-data relationship, so the learning process cannot quickly rely on image semantics and instead remains dependent on the perturbations. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and multiple pretrained backbones demonstrate that our approach produces UEs that remain effective in the presence of pretraining priors.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 4585