SAGE: Similarity-Based Cleaning of Poisoned Training Data from Verified Examples

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As machine learning increasingly relies on public, untrusted data sources, data poisoning attacks, which inject malicious examples into training data to induce misclassification of a chosen target, pose a growing threat. Existing defenses either assume zero ground-truth information about which examples are poisoned, or they assume access to a large set of examples verified to be clean. Satisfying the latter assumption incurs significant cost since reliable verification can be very resource- or labor-intensive. This cost is particularly high for clean-label attacks, where poisoned examples are visually indistinguishable from clean data. Since requiring a large set of verified examples is impractical, we propose relying on a small set of verified examples including both clean and poisoned ones, i.e., each example verified either to be clean or poisoned through inspection by a forensic expert. The challenge is then to detect poisons based on a set of verified examples that is so small that most classification models would overfit. To address this challenge, we propose Similarity-based Approach for Ground-truth-driven Exclusion (SAGE), which trains a generic feature extractor on a separate dataset and then flags poisoned training examples using a non-parametric, similarity-weighted prediction based on the verified set. On standard benchmarks against seven clean-label attack methods, we demonstrate that having access to even a handful of verified poisoned examples provides a substantial advantage. We also find that the distribution of verified clean examples across classes matters more than the number of verified examples.