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Fine-Tuning Is All You Need to Mitigate Backdoor Attacks

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arxiv 2212.09067 v1 pith:53MGPZZZ submitted 2022-12-18 cs.CR cs.CVcs.LG

classification cs.CRcs.CVcs.LG
keywords backdoorlearningmachinemodelsattacksfine-tuningmodelbackdoors
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Backdoor attacks represent one of the major threats to machine learning models. Various efforts have been made to mitigate backdoors. However, existing defenses have become increasingly complex and often require high computational resources or may also jeopardize models' utility. In this work, we show that fine-tuning, one of the most common and easy-to-adopt machine learning training operations, can effectively remove backdoors from machine learning models while maintaining high model utility. Extensive experiments over three machine learning paradigms show that fine-tuning and our newly proposed super-fine-tuning achieve strong defense performance. Furthermore, we coin a new term, namely backdoor sequela, to measure the changes in model vulnerabilities to other attacks before and after the backdoor has been removed. Empirical evaluation shows that, compared to other defense methods, super-fine-tuning leaves limited backdoor sequela. We hope our results can help machine learning model owners better protect their models from backdoor threats. Also, it calls for the design of more advanced attacks in order to comprehensively assess machine learning models' backdoor vulnerabilities.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Follow My Eyes: Backdoor Attacks on Goal-Directed Scanpath Prediction

    cs.CR 2026-04 conditional novelty 7.5 of 10

    Scene-conditioned spatial-misdirection and duration-inflation backdoors succeed at 2.5–10% poison ratios on multimodal scanpath predictors and resist five adapted defenses.

  2. Backdoor Attack on Vision Language Models with Stealthy Semantic Manipulation

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    BadSem shows that semantic mismatches between images and text can serve as stealthy backdoor triggers for VLMs, achieving near-perfect attack success with low poisoning rates.

  3. Where Do Backdoors Live? A Component-Level Analysis of Backdoor Propagation in Speech Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Backdoors propagate through SLM components with persistence or erasure depending on the targeted part, and poisoned samples are not directly separable from benign ones in shared multitask embeddings.

  4. Mitigating Data Exfiltration Attacks through Layer-Wise Learning Rate Decay Fine-Tuning

    cs.LG 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A layer-wise learning rate decay fine-tuning protocol corrupts steganographically embedded training data in exported medical models while preserving classification utility.

  5. BadSR: Stealthy Label Backdoor Attacks on Image Super-Resolution

    cs.CV 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    BadSR creates stealthy poisoned high-resolution labels for super-resolution backdoors, achieving above 80% attack success across five SR models while keeping labels visually close to clean images.

  6. A Robust Attack: Displacement Backdoor Attack

    cs.CR 2025-02 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Displacement Backdoor Attack blends shifted self-copies of an image into the original as a backdoor trigger and reportedly maintains high attack success under data augmentation.

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