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Abstract
Indiscriminate data poisoning attacks aim to decrease a model's test accuracy
by injecting a small amount of corrupted training data. Despite significant
interest, existing attacks remain relatively ineffective against modern machine
learning (ML) architectures. In this work, we introduce the notion of model
poisoning reachability as a technical tool to explore the intrinsic limits of
data poisoning attacks towards target parameters (i.e., model-targeted
attacks). We derive an easily computable threshold to establish and quantify a
surprising phase transition phenomenon among popular ML models: data poisoning
attacks can achieve certain target parameters only when the poisoning ratio
exceeds our threshold. Building on existing parameter corruption attacks and
refining the Gradient Canceling attack, we perform extensive experiments to
confirm our theoretical findings, test the predictability of our transition
threshold, and significantly improve existing indiscriminate data poisoning
baselines over a range of datasets and models. Our work highlights the critical
role played by the poisoning ratio, and sheds new insights on existing
empirical results, attacks and mitigation strategies in data poisoning.