Detecting Backdoor Attacks on Deep Neural Networks by Activation Clustering

While ML models are being increasingly trusted to make decisions in different and varying areas, the safety of systems using such models has become an increasing concern. In particular, ML models are often trained on data from potentially untrustworthy sources, providing adversaries with the opportunity to manipulate them by inserting carefully crafted samples into the training set. Recent work has shown that this type of attack, called a poisoning attack, allows adversaries to insert backdoors or trojans into the model, enabling malicious behavior with simple external backdoor triggers at inference time and only a blackbox perspective of the model itself. Detecting this type of attack is challenging because the unexpected behavior occurs only when a backdoor trigger, which is known only to the adversary, is present. Model users, either direct users of training data or users of pre-trained model from a catalog, may not guarantee the safe operation of their ML-based system. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to backdoor detection and removal for neural networks. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate its effectiveness for neural networks classifying text and images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first methodology capable of detecting poisonous data crafted to insert backdoors and repairing the model that does not require a verified and trusted dataset.