A Gradient based Adversarial Augmentation Framework for Mitigating Unlearnable Datasets

Unlearnable data methods (ULD) protect public data from unauthorized model training by adding imperceptible perturbations that create a learning shortcut. A deep neural network can exploit the shortcut learning path to minimize training loss without learning generalizable features. Intuitively, finding adversarial versions of perturbed images that can substantially increase the model's loss can force the model to learn generalizable features. Existing data augmentation based attacks rely on heuristic search strategies/random sampling over a curated augmentation set to identify adversarial augmentation operations, an approach that often does not scale when the number of candidate operations is large. To address the challenge of a large search space, we propose {\techname}, a gradient based adversarial augmentation framework that learns an augmentation policy via stochastic gradient ascent. {\techname} leverages a differentiable data augmentation pipeline to efficiently search a set of up to 18 augmentation techniques, from which a grid search selects a protection-specific subset. The augmentation subset is trained to maximize a surrogate model's classification loss. We introduce a perceptual-plus-pixel regularization to learn operation parameters that preserve image semantics. Under a controlled ablation, {\techname} consistently outperforms an equivalent random sampling baseline (80.0% vs. 77.29% clean test accuracy on EMIN-protected CIFAR-10 for ResNet-18 and 83.28% vs. 66.45% on NTGA-protected CIFAR-10 for MobileNet-V2), demonstrating that gradient guidance drives the clean test accuracy recoverability rather than the expanded search space. {\techname} offers an effective and scalable adversarial augmentation framework for stress-testing ULD methods, a critical tool for developing robust ULD methods.