Diversity Matters: Distributional Feature Coverage Sample Selection for Data-Efficient Backdoor Attacks

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 10 Aug 2026] Diversity Matters: Distributional Feature Coverage Sample Selection for Data-Efficient Backdoor Attacks Yi Yang, Xiaoke Chen, Jinyang Huang, Feng-Qi Cui, Yu-Tong Guo, Jia-Cheng Zhao, Haiming Jin, Xiaokang Zhou, Meng Li Backdoor attacks compromise training data so that a model retains clean accuracy but predicts an attacker-chosen target on triggered inputs. At very low poisoning rates, only a few samples convey the trigger--target association, making poison-sample selection critical. Existing methods typically rank candidates using per-sample scores, which can select redundant samples from similar semantic regions, and many require task-specific surrogate training. We propose Distributional Feature Coverage Sample Selection (DFCS), a training-free, trigger-agnostic method that clusters fixed pretrained features into one region per poisoning slot and selects the centroid-nearest sample from each region. A local first-order analysis relates this allocation to feature-coverage and representative-mass terms. Across BadNets and Blended attacks on CIFAR-10, Tiny-ImageNet, and Imagenette, DFCS achieves the highest mean attack success rate among seven selectors in all six dataset--attack settings, averaging 96.30% and exceeding the strongest comparator in each setting by 4.60 percentage points on average while preserving clean accuracy. These results support distributional feature coverage as an effective selection principle for low-budget dirty-label backdoor attacks. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) Cite as: arXiv:2608.09047 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.09047v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.09047 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yi Yang [view email] [v1] Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:52:24 UTC (228 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.CV References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)