cs.CRJun 24, 2026

TEMPO-Diffusion: Temporally Exposed Malicious Poisoning of Diffusion Models

Authors: William AikenPaula BrancoGuy-Vincent JourdanIosif-Viorel Onut

Organizations: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada

Abstract

Noise-based backdoor attacks on diffusion models typically rely on input-time trigger injection, untargeted activation, and out-of-distribution target generation. Such assumptions reduce both the stealthiness and the practical relevance of these attacks. In this work, we present TEMPO-Diffusion, a targeted backdoor framework that localizes the malicious distribution shift to a temporal, in-distribution exposure. TEMPO-Diffusion supports: (i) targeted attacks on and to specific classes, (ii) multiple sub-image backdoors that reconstruct specific features within multiple, different output images and at multiple locations, and (iii) in-painting with time-conditioned triggers. To study relevant, practical security concerns in leveraging backdoored diffusion models for synthetic training data, we also introduce CALISA: a balanced, region-aware traffic-sign dataset emphasizing Canadian and U.S. road signs. Across CIFAR10, GTSRB, and CALISA, our experiments show that TEMPO-Diffusion can reliably poison class-specific synthetic data generation and induce high attack success rates in downstream classifiers trained on that data.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Backdooring Masked Diffusion Language Models

    May 19, 2026Daniel Yiming Cao, Chengzhong Wang, Sheng-Yen Chou +3Masked Diffusion Language ModelsBackdoor Attacks