defense arXiv Feb 18, 2026 · 6w ago
Philip Sosnin, Jodie Knapp, Fraser Kennedy et al. · Imperial College London · The Alan Turing Institute
First sound-and-complete certification of data poisoning robustness via a single mixed-integer quadratic program encoding training dynamics
Data Poisoning Attack
This work introduces a verification framework that provides both sound and complete guarantees for data poisoning attacks during neural network training. We formulate adversarial data manipulation, model training, and test-time evaluation in a single mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQCP) problem. Finding the global optimum of the proposed formulation provably yields worst-case poisoning attacks, while simultaneously bounding the effectiveness of all possible attacks on the given training pipeline. Our framework encodes both the gradient-based training dynamics and model evaluation at test time, enabling the first exact certification of training-time robustness. Experimental evaluation on small models confirms that our approach delivers a complete characterization of robustness against data poisoning.
traditional_ml Imperial College London · The Alan Turing Institute