Papers › BEAGLE: Forensics of Deep Learning Backdoor Attack for Better Defense

BEAGLE: Forensics of Deep Learning Backdoor Attack for Better Defense

16 Jan 2023arXiv:2301.06241archive 2025-07-28

Siyuan Cheng, Guanhong Tao, Yingqi Liu, Shengwei An, Xiangzhe Xu, Shiwei Feng, Guangyu Shen, Kaiyuan Zhang, QiuLing Xu, Shiqing Ma, Xiangyu Zhang

Deep Learning backdoor attacks have a threat model similar to traditional cyber attacks. Attack forensics, a critical counter-measure for traditional cyber attacks, is hence of importance for defending model backdoor attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel model backdoor forensics technique. Given a few attack samples such as inputs with backdoor triggers, which may represent different types of backdoors, our technique automatically decomposes them to clean inputs and the corresponding triggers. It then clusters the triggers based on their properties to allow automatic attack categorization and summarization. Backdoor scanners can then be automatically synthesized to find other instances of the same type of backdoor in other models. Our evaluation on 2,532 pre-trained models, 10 popular attacks, and comparison with 9 baselines show that our technique is highly effective. The decomposed clean inputs and triggers closely resemble the ground truth. The synthesized scanners substantially outperform the vanilla versions of existing scanners that can hardly generalize to different kinds of attacks.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

6 samples harvested; 3 ran; 2 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 6 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from megum1/beagle. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections