Abstract
Continual learning algorithms are typically exposed to untrusted sources that contain training data inserted by adversaries and bad actors. An adversary can insert a small number of poisoned samples, such as mislabeled samples from previously learned tasks, or intentional adversarial perturbed samples, into the training datasets, which can drastically reduce the model's performance. In this work, we demonstrate that continual learning systems can be manipulated by malicious misinformation and present a new category of data poisoning attacks specific for continual learners, which we refer to as \{\em Poisoning Attacks Against Continual Learners\} (PACOL). The effectiveness of labeling flipping attacks inspires PACOL; however, PACOL produces attack samples that do not change the sample's label and produce an attack that causes catastrophic forgetting. A comprehensive set of experiments shows the vulnerability of commonly used generative replay and regularization-based continual learning