Deep neural networks have been widely used in many critical applications, such as autonomous vehicles and medical diagnosis. However, their security is threatened by backdoor attack, which is achieved by adding artificial patterns to specific training data. Existing defense strategies primarily focus on using reverse engineering to reproduce the backdoor trigger generated by attackers and subsequently repair the DNN model by adding the trigger into inputs and fine-tuning the model with ground-truth labels. However, once the trigger generated by the attackers is complex and invisible, the defender can not successfully reproduce the trigger. Consequently, the DNN model will not be repaired since the trigger is not effectively removed.In this work, we propose Adversarial Feature Map Pruning for Backdoor (FMP) to mitigate backdoor from the DNN. Different from existing defense strategies, which focus on reproducing backdoor triggers, FMP tries to prune the backdoor feature maps, which are trained to extract backdoor information from the inputs. After pruning these backdoor feature maps, FMP will fine-tune the model with a secure subset of training data. Our experiments demonstrate that, compared to existing defense strategies, FMP can effectively reduce the Attack Success Rate (ASR) even against the most complex and invisible attack triggers (e.g., FMP decreases the ASR to 2.86\% in CIFAR10, 19.2\%-65.41\% lower than previous arts). Second, unlike conventional defense methods that tend to exhibit low Robust Accuracy (i.e., the model's accuracy on the poisoned data), FMP achieves higher RA, indicating its superiority in maintaining model performance while mitigating the effects of backdoor attacks (e.g., FMP obtains 87.40\% RA in CIFAR10). Third, compared to existing feature map pruning techniques, FMP can cover more backdoor feature maps (e.g., FMP removes 83.33\% of backdoor feature maps from the model in the CIFAR10 \& BadNet scenario).
Adversarial Feature Map Pruning for Backdoor
Dong HUANG Qingwen Bu