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Abstract
Deploying machine learning (ML) models in the wild is challenging as it
suffers from distribution shifts, where the model trained on an original domain
cannot generalize well to unforeseen diverse transfer domains. To address this
challenge, several test-time adaptation (TTA) methods have been proposed to
improve the generalization ability of the target pre-trained models under test
data to cope with the shifted distribution. The success of TTA can be credited
to the continuous fine-tuning of the target model according to the
distributional hint from the test samples during test time. Despite being
powerful, it also opens a new attack surface, i.e., test-time poisoning
attacks, which are substantially different from previous poisoning attacks that
occur during the training time of ML models (i.e., adversaries cannot intervene
in the training process). In this paper, we perform the first test-time
poisoning attack against four mainstream TTA methods, including TTT, DUA, TENT,
and RPL. Concretely, we generate poisoned samples based on the surrogate models
and feed them to the target TTA models. Experimental results show that the TTA
methods are generally vulnerable to test-time poisoning attacks. For instance,
the adversary can feed as few as 10 poisoned samples to degrade the performance
of the target model from 76.20% to 41.83%. Our results demonstrate that TTA
algorithms lacking a rigorous security assessment are unsuitable for deployment
in real-life scenarios. As such, we advocate for the integration of defenses
against test-time poisoning attacks into the design of TTA methods.