Backdoor_DPR

This repo contains the code for our paper "Backdoor Attacks on Dense Retrieval via Public and Unintentional Triggers".

Perturbation

1. BadDPR contains the code to perturb train, test and corpus files. Detailed in BadDPR/README.md.

DPR

1. DPR contains the code to train the encoder and run the retriever.
2. Follow DPR/README.md to install the required packages and download the required data.
3. Run the following commands to train the encoder and run the retriever.

cd DPR
bash script/template.sh

4. Change the parameters in DPR/script/template.sh to your own files which are defined in DPR/conf config files.

• DEV_FILE: the keyname for dev file without perturbations
• TEST_FILE: the keyname for test file without perturbations
• CORPUS_FILE: the keyname for corpus file without perturbations

• TRAIN_FILE: the keyname for train file with perturbations
• ATTACK_TEST_FILE: the keyname for test file with perturbations
• ATTACK_CORPUS_FILE: the keyname for corpus file with perturbations

Citation

@inproceedings{
long2025backdoor,
title={Backdoor Attacks on Dense Retrieval via Public and Unintentional Triggers},
author={Quanyu Long and Yue Deng and Leilei Gan and Wenya Wang and Sinno Jialin Pan},
booktitle={Second Conference on Language Modeling},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=RsnxggqW4l}
}