LGMar 20
Trojan horse hunt in deep forecasting models: Insights from the European Space Agency competitionKrzysztof Kotowski, Ramez Shendy, Jakub Nalepa et al.
Forecasting plays a crucial role in modern safety-critical applications, such as space operations. However, the increasing use of deep forecasting models introduces a new security risk of trojan horse attacks, carried out by hiding a backdoor in the training data or directly in the model weights. Once implanted, the backdoor is activated by a specific trigger pattern at test time, causing the model to produce manipulated predictions. We focus on this issue in our \textit{Trojan Horse Hunt} data science competition, where more than 200 teams faced the task of identifying triggers hidden in deep forecasting models for spacecraft telemetry. We describe the novel task formulation, benchmark set, evaluation protocol, and best solutions from the competition. We further summarize key insights and research directions for effective identification of triggers in time series forecasting models. All materials are publicly available on the official competition webpage https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/trojan-horse-hunt-in-space.
LGJul 17, 2025
Fake or Real: The Impostor Hunt in Texts for Space OperationsAgata Kaczmarek, Dawid Płudowski, Piotr Wilczyński et al.
The "Fake or Real" competition hosted on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/fake-or-real-the-impostor-hunt ) is the second part of a series of follow-up competitions and hackathons related to the "Assurance for Space Domain AI Applications" project funded by the European Space Agency (https://assurance-ai.space-codev.org/ ). The competition idea is based on two real-life AI security threats identified within the project -- data poisoning and overreliance in Large Language Models. The task is to distinguish between the proper output from LLM and the output generated under malicious modification of the LLM. As this problem was not extensively researched, participants are required to develop new techniques to address this issue or adjust already existing ones to this problem's statement.
LGJun 2, 2025
Trojan Horse Hunt in Time Series Forecasting for Space OperationsKrzysztof Kotowski, Ramez Shendy, Jakub Nalepa et al.
This competition hosted on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/trojan-horse-hunt-in-space) is the first part of a series of follow-up competitions and hackathons related to the "Assurance for Space Domain AI Applications" project funded by the European Space Agency (https://assurance-ai.space-codev.org/). The competition idea is based on one of the real-life AI security threats identified within the project -- the adversarial poisoning of continuously fine-tuned satellite telemetry forecasting models. The task is to develop methods for finding and reconstructing triggers (trojans) in advanced models for satellite telemetry forecasting used in safety-critical space operations. Participants are provided with 1) a large public dataset of real-life multivariate satellite telemetry (without triggers), 2) a reference model trained on the clean data, 3) a set of poisoned neural hierarchical interpolation (N-HiTS) models for time series forecasting trained on the dataset with injected triggers, and 4) Jupyter notebook with the training pipeline and baseline algorithm (the latter will be published in the last month of the competition). The main task of the competition is to reconstruct a set of 45 triggers (i.e., short multivariate time series segments) injected into the training data of the corresponding set of 45 poisoned models. The exact characteristics (i.e., shape, amplitude, and duration) of these triggers must be identified by participants. The popular Neural Cleanse method is adopted as a baseline, but it is not designed for time series analysis and new approaches are necessary for the task. The impact of the competition is not limited to the space domain, but also to many other safety-critical applications of advanced time series analysis where model poisoning may lead to serious consequences.