Removing the Trigger, Not the Backdoor: Alternative Triggers and Latent Backdoors

Multi-trigger backdoor attacks, in which heterogeneous trigger mechanisms (e.g., patch, blend, warping, and the latent-domain Spy-Watermark) coexist within a single poisoned model, cannot be addressed by existing shortcut-based defenses that assume a single, static attack mechanism. Current multi-trigger remedies (BU+FT, BU+ANP, and BU+ABL) rely on backdoor unlearning, which incurs high training costs and loses effectiveness at low poisoning ratios. This paper proposes Combinatorial Lock, a training-free, reference-calibrated defense that reduces multi-trigger identification to a combinatorial problem over binary activation signatures. This formulation is the key novelty: it yields a multi-trigger defense that is training-free, trigger-oblivious, and directly implementable in hardware, since its decision rules can be evaluated with integer and logic operations. The framework combines anomaly-gated spectral scrubbing, which removes the malicious subspace only from inputs identified as anomalous, with a hash-compressed combinatorial signature verified by an ensemble of detection experts, including a compound-attack-aware expert for multi-trigger inputs. A joint threshold-shrinkage search identifies an operating point ($τ$ at the 97.1st percentile, $γ= 0.78$) that reduces the attack success rate (ASR) to as low as 0.1% while preserving 97.8% clean accuracy. Evaluation on six models (ResNet18, VGG16, MobileNet, AlexNet, ViT-Small, ViT-Base) shows strong generalization: near-100% ASR drops to single digits across poisoning rates of 1-10% and 1-9 simultaneous triggers, with only gradual degradation in clean accuracy. ASIC and FPGA implementations confirm practicality, adding a consistent 19-20% latency overhead across all evaluated architectures and establishing Combinatorial Lock as a hardware-native approach to multi-trigger backdoor mitigation.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly deployed in real-world vision systems, yet their predictions can be covertly manipulated by backdoor attacks, in which malicious triggers cause targeted misclassification while preserving high clean accuracy. Existing defenses often rely on model internals, training data, or clean validation samples, making them difficult to deploy when only black-box access to a trained model is available. We propose TRIM (Trigger Removal by Identifying Manipulated Regions), a deployment-oriented black-box defense that detects and selectively removes backdoor triggers at inference time without requiring model internals, training data, or clean samples. The key insight behind TRIM is to identify image regions that are responsible for anomalous model behavior and purify only those regions while preserving benign content. TRIM innovates via three key components: (i) region-based segmentation with deep feature representations, (ii) adaptive trigger discovery through inpainting and diffusion-based reconstruction to isolate regions responsible for misclassification---without assumptions about trigger type, shape, or location, and (iii) selective region purification that cleans poisoned regions while retaining benign content. To support practical deployment, TRIM further caches feature embeddings of previously identified triggers, enabling efficient recognition and avoiding redundant detection and purification. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and backdoor types, including blended, sparse, varying-size, and multiple triggers, show that TRIM consistently outperforms existing black-box defenses, reducing attack success rates (ASR) to as low as 1.16% while preserving clean accuracy of up to 87.87%. These results demonstrate that effective backdoor mitigation is possible at inference time even when the defender has no access to any auxiliary data.

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.