{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/indiscriminate-poisoning-attacks-are-1","title":"Availability Attacks Create Shortcuts","arxiv_id":"2111.00898","date":"2021-11-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Da Yu","Huishuai Zhang","Wei Chen","Jian Yin","Tie-Yan Liu"],"abstract":"Availability attacks, which poison the training data with imperceptible perturbations, can make the data \\emph{not exploitable} by machine learning algorithms so as to prevent unauthorized use of data. In this work, we investigate why these perturbations work in principle. We are the first to unveil an important population property of the perturbations of these attacks: they are almost \\textbf{linearly separable} when assigned with the target labels of the corresponding samples, which hence can work as \\emph{shortcuts} for the learning objective. We further verify that linear separability is indeed the workhorse for availability attacks. We synthesize linearly-separable perturbations as attacks and show that they are as powerful as the deliberately crafted attacks. Moreover, such synthetic perturbations are much easier to generate. For example, previous attacks need dozens of hours to generate perturbations for ImageNet while our algorithm only needs several seconds. Our finding also suggests that the \\emph{shortcut learning} is more widely present than previously believed as deep models would rely on shortcuts even if they are of an imperceptible scale and mixed together with the normal features. Our source code is published at \\url{https://github.com/dayu11/Availability-Attacks-Create-Shortcuts}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00898v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.00898v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"indiscriminate-poisoning-attacks-are-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/dayu11/availability-attacks-create-shortcuts","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"data-poisoning","task_name":"Data Poisoning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2111.00898","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2111.00898"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/dayu11/availability-attacks-create-shortcuts","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"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"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"83ad097311ca1d55","entry":"normalize_01","repo":"dayu11/availability-attacks-create-shortcuts","repo_kind":"official","path":"perturbations_are_linear_separable/test_linear_separability.py","file_url":"https://github.com/dayu11/availability-attacks-create-shortcuts/blob/HEAD/perturbations_are_linear_separable/test_linear_separability.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"83ad097311ca1d55"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}