Competition Eligibility
This competition is open to students enrolled in undergraduate or graduate degree programs from around the world, as well as industry teams (ie, those with non-student participants).
Competition Structure
The organizers will provide a backdoored model and the competition requires the participants to mitigate the backdoor behavior. The competition is divided into a qualifying round and a final round, as follows:
Qualifying Round
Submission Deadline: 18 October 2020, 23:59 EST
Competitors must develop a defense against a backdoored model provided by the competition organizers.
Qualification Round Status
Notification by 20 October 2020, 23:59 EST
Once the Qualifying Round deadline has passed, team submissions will be assessed by NYU organizers. Assessors will evaluate the submissions based on several criteria, including clean data prediction accuracy, backdoor attack success rate, ability to reverse engineer the trigger and identify the target label, identify poisoned inputs from test data, detect if the model is backdoored, and defense generalization to other attack types.
Up to six (6) student finalist teams and up to three (3) industry teams will be invited to compete in Finals.
Final Round
05 – 08 November 2020
The Final Round is held during the annual CSAW’20 conference, which will be a virtual event this year. We anticipate that final competition presentations and judging will take place on Friday 06 November with an award ceremony on 08 November 2020. Exact details will be provided to students at the point of finalist notification.
Rules for the Qualifying Rounds
- Registration is required and will remain open from 1 September through 18 October 2020, 23:59 EST.
- Each team should consist of no more than 4 players
- Team members do not need to attend the same university/college nor work in the same organization.
- All players must compete under only 1 team name; playing for multiple teams is not permitted.
- Teams should work independently. Sharing answers privately or publicly, or collaborating with another team to secure multiple spots at Finals constitutes cheating.
Final Round Eligibility
Student teams will be asked to verify their enrollment prior to being offered a spot at Finals.
Finals Format
Virtual participation in CSAW Finals is contingent upon finalists’ ability to adhere to the remote presentation guidelines. These details will be provided to finalists at the point of finalist notification. We anticipate that teams will be required to present their work via a Zoom meeting or webinar.
Prizes
Cash prizes of $US1000, $US750, and $US500 will be awarded to the top three student teams. Prizes will be distributed in late November 2020.
Industry teams are not eligible for cash prizes, but a 1st place industry team will be acknowledged at the Award Ceremony.
Use of Personal Data
Personal data (ie, name, school, email) that is collected through the registration process is accessible only by the competition organizers and is used for the following purposes:
– Reminding registrants of competition timelines, rules, and updates
– Sending occasional updates regarding future CSAW events
– Determining and contacting finalist teams and team members
– Examining multi-year participation of teams and individual player
– Determining and reporting the total number of teams and total estimated individual participation
– Determining and reporting demographic trends related to participation, such as what countries have the highest number of teams participating
CSAW will not rent, sell, or share personal data with anyone other than the competition organizers.
Contacts
Please direct your inquiries to csaw-hackml@nyu.edu.
