Density-aware Sample-specific Attack
For security researchers and ML practitioners, this work reveals a fundamental gap in current backdoor defenses, showing that attacks exploiting low-density regions evade fine-tuning and pruning defenses entirely.
The paper introduces a density-aware backdoor attack that places triggered samples in low-density regions of the clean data distribution, achieving >99% attack success rate before defense and retaining 50-85 percentage points higher post-defense ASR than baselines under fine-tuning, with complete immunity to neuron-pruning defenses.
Despite recent progress in backdoor attacks, existing methods remain susceptible to post-training defenses that erase the backdoor through fine-tuning or pruning. We revisit the core objectives of backdoor attacks and derive principled criteria characterizing optimal sample-specific trigger construction under a Bayes-optimal model of the victim's training. Our analysis reveals that both attack success and clean-accuracy preservation are simultaneously optimized when triggered samples are steered into low-density regions of the clean data distribution, a distributional condition that controls all moments of the poisoned distribution at once rather than a handful of input-space summary statistics. We introduce a bilevel optimization framework that estimates density ratios via conditional time-score matching and optimizes a mixture-model objective to place triggered samples in these sparse regions. Extensive evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR-10, GTSRB, and TinyImageNet demonstrate that our method achieves above 99\% attack success rate before defense and retains 50--85 percentage points higher post-defense ASR than the strongest baselines under fine-tuning defenses. Against neuron-pruning defenses, the method exhibits complete immunity, with zero neurons identified for removal across all pruning thresholds. These results expose a fundamental gap in current defense paradigms and underscore the need for defenses that operate beyond the support of the clean distribution.