# Towards Adversarial Robustness And Backdoor Mitigation in SSL

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15918 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15918/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08864/) (2017)
- [Neural Attention Distillation: Erasing Backdoor Triggers from Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05930/) (2021)
- [Backdoor Defense via Decoupling the Training Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03423/) (2022)
- [Backdoor Attacks on Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10123/) (2021)
- [PatchAttack: A Black-box Texture-based Attack with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05682/) (2020)
- [FIBA: Frequency-Injection based Backdoor Attack in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01148/) (2021)
- [PoisonedEncoder: Poisoning the Unlabeled Pre-training Data in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06401/) (2022)
- [Defending Against Patch-based Backdoor Attacks on Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01482/) (2023)
- [Backdoor Cleansing with Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12044/) (2022)
- [Single Image Backdoor Inversion via Robust Smoothed Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00215/) (2023)
- [Robust Perception through Equivariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06079/) (2022)
- [Augmentation Backdoors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15139/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has shown great promise in learning representations from unlabeled data. The power of learning representations without the need for human annotations has made SSL a widely used technique in real-world problems. However, SSL methods have recently been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where the learned model can be exploited by adversaries to manipulate the learned representations, either through tampering the training data distribution, or via modifying the model itself. This work aims to address defending against backdoor attacks in SSL, where the adversary has access to a realistic fraction of the SSL training data, and no access to the model. We use novel methods that are computationally efficient as well as generalizable across different problem settings. We also investigate the adversarial robustness of SSL models when trained with our method, and show insights into increased robustness in SSL via frequency domain augmentations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of SSL benchmarks, and show that our method is able to mitigate backdoor attacks while maintaining high performance on downstream tasks. Code for our work is available at github.com/Aryan-Satpathy/Backdoor