Dual-branch Robust Unlearnable Examples

Unlearnable examples (UEs) aim to compromise model training by injecting imperceptible perturbations to clean samples. However, existing UE schemes exhibit limited robustness against advanced defenses due to their heuristic design or narrowly scoped domain perturbations. To address this, we propose textttDUNE, a underlineDual-branch underlineUNlearnable underlineEnsemble perturbation optimization approach. Specifically, textttDUNE separately optimizes perturbations in the spatial and color domains to establish the mapping between perturbations and shift-induced labels. This design extends the perturbation domain to increase noise intensity for improving robustness and drives the models to learn perturbation-oriented features with degraded generalization, thereby achieving unlearnability. To strengthen textttDUNE's performance, we further propose an unlearnability-enhancing ensemble strategy that aggregates diverse pre-trained models during the dual-branch optimization. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets CIFAR-10 and ImageNet verify that textttDUNE's robustness outperforms 12 SOTA UE schemes under 7 mainstream defenses, yielding a lower average test accuracy of 14.95% to 50.82%.