CIS-BA: Continuous Interaction Space Based Backdoor Attack for Object Detection in the Real-World

TL;DR

CIS-BA introduces a novel backdoor attack method for object detection that leverages continuous interaction patterns between objects, enabling robust multi-object attacks and evading defenses in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

It redefines trigger design by modeling inter-object interactions as a continuous space, enabling multi-trigger attacks and improving robustness against defenses.

Findings

Achieves over 97% attack success in complex environments.

Maintains over 95% effectiveness under dynamic multi-trigger conditions.

Successfully evades three state-of-the-art defenses.

Abstract

Object detection models deployed in real-world applications such as autonomous driving face serious threats from backdoor attacks. Despite their practical effectiveness,existing methods are inherently limited in both capability and robustness due to their dependence on single-trigger-single-object mappings and fragile pixel-level cues. We propose CIS-BA, a novel backdoor attack paradigm that redefines trigger design by shifting from static object features to continuous inter-object interaction patterns that describe how objects co-occur and interact in a scene. By modeling these patterns as a continuous interaction space, CIS-BA introduces space triggers that, for the first time, enable a multi-trigger-multi-object attack mechanism while achieving robustness through invariant geometric relations. To implement this paradigm, we design CIS-Frame, which constructs space triggers via interaction analysis, formalizes them as class-geometry constraints for sample poisoning, and embeds the backdoor during detector training. CIS-Frame supports both single-object attacks (object misclassification and disappearance) and multi-object simultaneous attacks, enabling complex and coordinated effects across diverse interaction states. Experiments on MS-COCO and real-world videos show that CIS-BA achieves over 97% attack success under complex environments and maintains over 95% effectiveness under dynamic multi-trigger conditions, while evading three state-of-the-art defenses. In summary, CIS-BA extends the landscape of backdoor attacks in interaction-intensive scenarios and provides new insights into the security of object detection systems.