Backdoor as Probe: Test-Time Adversarial Defense for CLIP

Zhongqi Wang, Jie Zhang, Nie Sen, Zhiyu Chen, Shiguang Shan +1

Test-time adversarial defense improves the robustness of vision-language foundation models such as CLIP without retraining. However, adversarial activation shifts are typically treated as distortions to suppress, rather than signals to exploit. We turn these shifts into defense signals by repurposing the trigger-to-target mechanism of backdoors. The key is to implant a defender-controlled backdoor as a probe that is weakly activated by clean inputs but strongly activated by adversarial shifts. Based on this insight, we propose \emph{Backdoor as Probe} (BaP), a test-time adversarial defense for CLIP. BaP constructs the probe through a closed-form model edit to a selected MLP layer. It projects the average adversarial activation shift and a defender-specified semantic direction onto the layer's low-energy input and output activation subspaces to obtain the trigger and target directions, respectively. At inference time, adversarial inputs produce measurable responses along the target direction for detection. BaP then selectively rectifies detected inputs by optimizing a small perturbation that steers their representations away from adversarial shifts and toward the clean subspace.…