Hey there 👋
I'm Dao Duc Thinh (🇻🇳) aka Will!
Undergraduate CS Student @ Vin University
I am a 4th year CS student at VinUni. I am fortunate to work as a research assistant at VinUni Security and Artificial Intelligence Lab for the past 2 years, under the supervision of Prof. Kok-Seng Wong and Prof. Khoa D. Doan. My research lies in the intersection of Adversarial Machine Learning, Federated Learning (FL) and Explainable AI (XAI). I am actively looking for a research internship starting from Spring 2025.
Academic Interests

Besides my research, I'm also very passionate in learning about Reinforcement Learning (RL). I find the concept of decision making (e.g., exploitation & exploration) in RL very intuitive to human intelligence. I find it fascinating to implement state-of-the-art RL algorithms to create agents that can play games, navigate environments, and interact with the world in a human-like manner. It would be awesome to one day work on this field!


I'm also very interested in doing research and building applications using Large Language Models (LLMs). The potential of LLMs in revolutionizing various industries is immense, and I'm looking forward to utilize these models in building applications that can solve real-world problems.

Hobbies

In my free time, I love to code and build meaningful projects that people can use. Building projects is a great way to satisfy my outlet for creativity. Besides, I also love teaching. I have 2 years of experience working as SAT and Java tutor, helping high-school students with their SAT and AP Computer Science A exams. I also mentored two undergraduate students in my lab to do their research on backdoor attacks in Federated Learning.

Contact

You can email me at:

I believe that the best way to learn and memorize something is to write about it. Therefore, in this website, you can find my blog where I write about various AI topics that I'm interested in.

Towards Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks in the Physical World

Preprint

Towards Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks in the Physical World

Thinh Dao, Cuong Chi Le, Khoa D Doan, Kok-Seng Wong

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor poisoning attacks, with most research focusing on digital triggers, special patterns digitally added to test-time inputs to induce targeted misclassification. In contrast, physical triggers, which are natural objects within a physical scene, have emerged as a desirable alternative since they enable real-time backdoor activations without digital manipulation. However, current physical attacks require that poisoned inputs have incorrect labels, making them easily detectable upon human inspection. In this paper, we collect a facial dataset of 21,238 images with 7 common accessories as triggers and use it to study the threat of clean-label backdoor attacks in the physical world. Our study reveals two findings. First, the success of physical attacks depends on the poisoning algorithm, physical trigger, and the pair of source-target classes. Second, although clean-label poisoned samples preserve ground-truth labels, their perceptual quality could be seriously degraded due to conspicuous artifacts in the images. Such samples are also vulnerable to statistical filtering methods because they deviate from the distribution of clean samples in the feature space. To address these issues, we propose replacing the standard ℓ∞ regularization with a novel pixel regularization and feature regularization that could enhance the imperceptibility of poisoned samples without compromising attack performance. Our study highlights accidental backdoor activations as a key limitation of clean-label physical backdoor attacks. This happens when unintended objects or classes accidentally cause the model to misclassify as the target class.

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