# CUDA: Convolution-based Unlearnable Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07572/) (2018)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08573/) (2019)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [BadNets: Identifying Vulnerabilities in the Machine Learning Model Supply Chain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06733/) (2017)
- [Targeted Backdoor Attacks on Deep Learning Systems Using Data Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05526/) (2017)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [Poison Frogs! Targeted Clean-Label Poisoning Attacks on Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00792/) (2018)
- [Reflection Backdoor: A Natural Backdoor Attack on Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02343/) (2020)
- [VirTex: Learning Visual Representations from Textual Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06666/) (2020)
- [Neural Attention Distillation: Erasing Backdoor Triggers from Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05930/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11156/) (2023)
- [MetaCloak: Preventing Unauthorized Subject-driven Text-to-image Diffusion-based Synthesis via Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13127/) (2023)
- [Unlearnable Examples Give a False Sense of Security: Piercing through Unexploitable Data with Learnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09241/) (2023)
- [Unlearnable 3D Point Clouds: Class-wise Transformation Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03644/) (2024)
- [UnSeg: One Universal Unlearnable Example Generator is Enough against All Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09909/) (2024)
- [Semantic Deep Hiding for Robust Unlearnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17349/) (2024)
- [Efficient Availability Attacks against Supervised and Contrastive Learning Simultaneously](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04010/) (2024)
- [Ungeneralizable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14016/) (2024)
- [ECLIPSE: Expunging Clean-label Indiscriminate Poisons via Sparse Diffusion Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15093/) (2024)
- [PosCUDA: Position based Convolution for Unlearnable Audio Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02135/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Unlearnable Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23536/) (2025)
- [When Priors Backfire: On the Vulnerability of Unlearnable Examples to Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04731/) (2026)
- [Towards Generalizable Data Protection With Transferable Unlearnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11191/) (2023)
- [Towards Operationalizing Right to Data Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08506/) (2024)
- [T2UE: Generating Unlearnable Examples from Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03091/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Attacks for Good: A Survey of Proactive Protection across the Visual Content Lifecycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04314/) (2026)
- [Beyond Full Poisoning: Effective Availability Attacks with Partial Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02437/) (2024)
- [Exploiting Supervised Poison Vulnerability to Strengthen Self-Supervised Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08509/) (2024)
- [Learning from Convolution-based Unlearnable Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01742/) (2024)
- [Perturbation-Induced Linearization: Constructing Unlearnable Data with Solely Linear Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19967/) (2026)
- [AI Security in the Foundation Model Era: A Comprehensive Survey from a Unified Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24857/) (2026)
- [Re-thinking Data Availablity Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10691/) (2023)
- [Learning to Generate Cross-Task Unexploitable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13416/) (2025)
- [SoK: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Current Status of Neural Tangent Generalization Attacks with Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12792/) (2026)
- [VoxShield: Protecting 3D Medical Datasets from Unauthorized Training via Frequency-Aware Inter-Slice Disruption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17345/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Imperfect Restoration for Data Availability Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04627/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale training of modern deep learning models heavily relies on publicly available data on the web. This potentially unauthorized usage of online data leads to concerns regarding data privacy. Recent works aim to make unlearnable data for deep learning models by adding small, specially designed noises to tackle this issue. However, these methods are vulnerable to adversarial training (AT) and/or are computationally heavy. In this work, we propose a novel, model-free, Convolution-based Unlearnable DAtaset (CUDA) generation technique. CUDA is generated using controlled class-wise convolutions with filters that are randomly generated via a private key. CUDA encourages the network to learn the relation between filters and labels rather than informative features for classifying the clean data. We develop some theoretical analysis demonstrating that CUDA can successfully poison Gaussian mixture data by reducing the clean data performance of the optimal Bayes classifier. We also empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of CUDA with various datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, and Tiny-ImageNet), and architectures (ResNet-18, VGG-16, Wide ResNet-34-10, DenseNet-121, DeIT, EfficientNetV2-S, and MobileNetV2). Our experiments show that CUDA is robust to various data augmentations and training approaches such as smoothing, AT with different budgets, transfer learning, and fine-tuning. For instance, training a ResNet-18 on ImageNet-100 CUDA achieves only 8.96%, 40.08%, and 20.58% clean test accuracies with empirical risk minimization (ERM), L∞ AT, and L2 AT, respectively. Here, ERM on the clean training data achieves a clean test accuracy of 80.66%. CUDA exhibits unlearnability effect with ERM even when only a fraction of the training dataset is perturbed. Furthermore, we also show that CUDA is robust to adaptive defenses designed specifically to break it.