Ten-Guard: Tensor Decomposition for Backdoor Attack Detection in Deep Neural Networks

As deep neural networks and the datasets used to train them get larger, the default approach to integrating them into research and commercial projects is to download a pre-trained model and fine tune it. But these models can have uncertain provenance, opening up the possibility that they embed hidden malicious behavior such as trojans or backdoors, where small changes to an input (triggers) can cause the model to produce incorrect outputs (e.g., to misclassify). This paper introduces a novel approach to backdoor detection that uses two tensor decomposition methods applied to network activations. This has a number of advantages relative to existing detection methods, including the ability to analyze multiple models at the same time, working across a wide variety of network architectures, making no assumptions about the nature of triggers used to alter network behavior, and being computationally efficient. We provide a detailed description of the detection pipeline along with results on models trained on the MNIST digit dataset, CIFAR-10 dataset, and two difficult datasets from NIST’s TrojAI competition. These results show that our method detects backdoored networks more accurately and efficiently than current state-of-the-art methods.