Data Poisoning Attacks on Crowdsourcing Learning

Understanding and assessing the vulnerability of crowdsourcing learning against data poisoning attacks is the key to ensure the quality of classifiers trained from crowdsourced labeled data. Existing studies on data poisoning attacks only focus on exploring the vulnerability of crowdsourced label collection. In fact, instead of the quality of labels themselves, the performance of the trained classifier is a main concern in crowdsourcing learning. Nonetheless, the impact of data poisoning attacks on the final classifiers remains underexplored to date. We aim to bridge this gap. First, we formalize the problem of poisoning attacks, where the objective is to sabotage the trained classifier maximally. Second, we transform the problem into a bilevel min-max optimization problem for the typical learning-from-crowds model and design an efficient adversarial strategy. Extensive validation on real-world datasets demonstrates that our attack can significantly decrease the test accuracy of trained classifiers. We verified that the labels generated with our strategy can be transferred to attack a broad family of crowdsourcing learning models in a black-box setting, indicating its applicability and potential of being extended to the physical world.