Adversarial Benchmarks and BenchDoor Attacks: Exploiting Benchmark Incentives for Backdoor Attacks
Machine learning benchmarks act as guideposts for model development and spur the creation of training datasets intended to improve benchmark scores. We introduce BenchDoor, a family of data poisoning attacks that exploits this incentive. Beyond preserving benign performance, BenchDoor requires benchmark gains that encourage adoption of data that also implants a backdoor. The adversary either manipulates a benchmark's training or test data, creating an adversarial benchmark, or supplies an independent training dataset while leaving the benchmark unchanged. We formalize five attack scenarios, including training on rewritten test examples and applying similarity-based decontamination. Across...
| Authors | Yixin Wu, Rachel Hong, Jamie Morgenstern et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 21 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.