# Combinational Backdoor Attack against Customized Text-to-Image Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12389/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 48 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)
- LLM safety and security / [Backdoor and data poisoning attacks](https://mlsanity.com/safety/backdoor-and-data-poisoning-attacks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [How To Backdoor Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00459/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13848/) (2023)
- [InstantBooth: Personalized Text-to-Image Generation without Test-Time Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03411/) (2023)
- [ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10369/) (2020)
- [More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05744/) (2021)
- [Poisoning and Backdooring Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09667/) (2021)
- [BadEncoder: Backdoor Attacks to Pre-trained Encoders in Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00352/) (2021)
- [BadCLIP: Dual-Embedding Guided Backdoor Attack on Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12075/) (2023)
- [Chinese CLIP: Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01335/) (2022)
- [How to Backdoor Diffusion Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05400/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BadRefSR: Backdoor Attacks Against Reference-based Image Super Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20943/) (2025)
- [Semantic-level Backdoor Attack against Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04898/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, Text-to-Image (T2I) synthesis technology has made tremendous strides. Numerous representative T2I models have emerged and achieved promising application outcomes, such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Imagen, etc. In practice, it has become increasingly popular for model developers to selectively adopt personalized pre-trained text encoders and conditional diffusion models from third-party platforms, integrating them together to build customized (personalized) T2I models. However, such an adoption approach is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. In this work, we propose a Combinational Backdoor Attack against Customized T2I models (CBACT2I) targeting this application scenario. Different from previous backdoor attacks against T2I models, CBACT2I embeds the backdoor into the text encoder and the conditional diffusion model separately. The customized T2I model exhibits backdoor behaviors only when the backdoor text encoder is used in combination with the backdoor conditional diffusion model. These properties make CBACT2I more stealthy and controllable than prior backdoor attacks against T2I models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high effectiveness of CBACT2I with different backdoor triggers and backdoor targets, the strong generality on different combinations of customized text encoders and diffusion models, as well as the high stealthiness against state-of-the-art backdoor detection methods.