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arXiv · 2402.18945

SynGhost: Invisible and Universal Task-agnostic Backdoor Attack via Syntactic Transfer

Pengzhou Cheng·Wei Du·Zongru Wu·Fengwei Zhang·Libo Chen·Zhuosheng Zhang·Gongshen Liu
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Abstract

Although pre-training achieves remarkable performance, it suffers from task-agnostic backdoor attacks due to vulnerabilities in data and training mechanisms. These attacks can transfer backdoors to various downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce $\mathtt{maxEntropy}$, an entropy-based poisoning filter that mitigates such risks. To overcome the limitations of manual target setting and explicit triggers, we propose $\mathtt{SynGhost}$, an invisible and universal task-agnostic backdoor attack via syntactic transfer, further exposing vulnerabilities in pre-trained language models (PLMs). Specifically, $\mathtt{SynGhost}$ injects multiple syntactic backdoors into the pre-training space through corpus poisoning, while preserving the PLM's pre-training capabilities. Second, $\mathtt{SynGhost}$ adaptively selects optimal targets based on contrastive learning, creating a uniform distribution in the pre-training space. To identify syntactic differences, we also introduce an awareness module to minimize interference between backdoors. Experiments show that $\mathtt{SynGhost}$ poses significant threats and can transfer to various downstream tasks. Furthermore, $\mathtt{SynGhost}$ resists defenses based on perplexity, fine-pruning, and $\mathtt{maxEntropy}$. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhou-CyberSecurity-AI/SynGhost.

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Pengzhou Cheng, Wei Du, Zongru Wu, Fengwei Zhang, Libo Chen, Zhuosheng Zhang, Gongshen Liu. 2024-02-29. SynGhost: Invisible and Universal Task-agnostic Backdoor Attack via Syntactic Transfer. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18945

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