Recent studies have shown that neural networks are vulnerable to Trojan
attacks, where a network is trained to respond to specially crafted trigger
patterns in the inputs in specific and potentially malicious ways. This paper
proposes MISA, a new online approach to detect Trojan triggers for neural
networks at inference time. Our approach is based on a novel notion called
misattributions, which captures the anomalous manifestation of a Trojan
activation in the feature space. Given an input image and the corresponding
output prediction, our algorithm first computes the model's attribution on
different features. It then statistically analyzes these attributions to
ascertain the presence of a Trojan trigger. Across a set of benchmarks, we show
that our method can effectively detect Trojan triggers for a wide variety of
trigger patterns, including several recent ones for which there are no known
defenses. Our method achieves 96% AUC for detecting images that include a
Trojan trigger without any assumptions on the trigger pattern.