Papers › Label Poisoning is All You Need

Label Poisoning is All You Need

29 Oct 2023NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2310.18933archive 2025-07-28

In a backdoor attack, an adversary injects corrupted data into a model's training dataset in order to gain control over its predictions on images with a specific attacker-defined trigger. A typical corrupted training example requires altering both the image, by applying the trigger, and the label. Models trained on clean images, therefore, were considered safe from backdoor attacks. However, in some common machine learning scenarios, the training labels are provided by potentially malicious third-parties. This includes crowd-sourced annotation and knowledge distillation. We, hence, investigate a fundamental question: can we launch a successful backdoor attack by only corrupting labels? We introduce a novel approach to design label-only backdoor attacks, which we call FLIP, and demonstrate its strengths on three datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet) and four architectures (ResNet-32, ResNet-18, VGG-19, and Vision Transformer). With only 2% of CIFAR-10 labels corrupted, FLIP achieves a near-perfect attack success rate of 99.4% while suffering only a 1.8% drop in the clean test accuracy. Our approach builds upon the recent advances in trajectory matching, originally introduced for dataset distillation.

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

10 samples harvested; 6 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 4 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 10 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 SewoongLab/FLIP. “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.

Methods

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