Finding Naturally Occurring Physical Backdoors in Image Datasets Emily Wenger University of Chicago Roma Bhattacharjee

Extensive literature on backdoor poison attacks has studied attacks and defenses for backdoors using "digital trigger patterns." In contrast, "physical backdoors" use physical objects as triggers, have only recently been identified, and are qualitatively different enough to resist most defenses targeting digital trigger backdoors. Research on physical backdoors is limited by access to large datasets containing real images of physical objects co-located with misclassification targets . Building these datasets is time-and labor-intensive. This work seeks to address the challenge of accessibility for research on physical backdoor attacks.