CACTUS: Mask-Guided Semantic Clean-Label Backdoors in Decentralized Federated Learning
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
arXiv:2609.02450 (cs)
[Submitted on 2 Sep 2026]
Title:CACTUS: Mask-Guided Semantic Clean-Label Backdoors in Decentralized Federated Learning
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Abstract:Semantic triggers in federated learning (FL) can be less conspicuous than synthetic patches, but sample-dependent placement may weaken backdoor implantation across aggregation rounds. This challenge is compounded in decentralized FL (DFL), where topology-dependent peer aggregation repeatedly mixes local models. CACTUS converts label-consistent semantic pairs into target-directed representation shifts. Mask-guided, modality-specific operators isolate trigger effects, couple them across samples, and apply the shifts counterfactually to clean non-target embeddings before peer aggregation. Experiments cover speech, text, tabular, and image tasks under nine aggregation rules. With 30\% malicious nodes, CACTUS reaches a nine-rule mean attack success rate (ASR) of 51.2\% on Speech Commands and the highest nine-rule mean ASR among evaluated attacks on three of four modalities. Sensitivity analyses show that ASR varies with network topology and increases with the malicious-node ratio. These results indicate that CACTUS can propagate backdoors through repeated DFL aggregation.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.02450 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2609.02450v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.02450
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled CACTUS: Mask-Guided Semantic Clean-Label Backdoors in Decentralized Federated Learning, by Chao Feng and Burkhard Stiller
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