Data poisoning: issues, challenges, and needs

Abstract

Data poisoning attacks, where adversaries manipulate training data to degrade model performance, are an emerging threat as machine learning becomes widely deployed in sensitive applications. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of data poisoning including attack techniques, adversary incentives, impacts on security and reliability, detection methods, defenses, and key research gaps. We examine label flipping, instance injection, backdoors, and other attack categories that enable malicious outcomes ranging from IP theft to accidents in autonomous systems. Promising detection approaches include statistical tests, robust learning, and forensics. However, significant challenges remain in translating academic defenses like adversarial training and sanitization into practical tools ready for operational use. With safety and trustworthiness at stake, more research on benchmarking evaluations, adaptive attacks, fundamental tradeoffs, and real-world deployment of defenses is urgently needed. Understanding vulnerabilities and developing resilient machine learning pipelines will only grow in importance as data integrity is fundamental to developing safe artificial intelligence.