Silent Branding Attack: Trigger-free Data Poisoning Attack on
  Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: name: Sangwon Jang; name: June Suk Choi; name: Jaehyeong Jo; name: Kimin Lee; name: Sung Ju Hwang
Published: 2025-03-12 17:21:57

Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating
high-quality contents from text prompts. However, their reliance on publicly
available data and the growing trend of data sharing for fine-tuning make these
models particularly vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. In this work, we
introduce the Silent Branding Attack, a novel data poisoning method that
manipulates text-to-image diffusion models to generate images containing
specific brand logos or symbols without any text triggers. We find that when
certain visual patterns are repeatedly in the training data, the model learns
to reproduce them naturally in its outputs, even without prompt mentions.
Leveraging this, we develop an automated data poisoning algorithm that
unobtrusively injects logos into original images, ensuring they blend naturally
and remain undetected. Models trained on this poisoned dataset generate images
containing logos without degrading image quality or text alignment. We
experimentally validate our silent branding attack across two realistic
settings on large-scale high-quality image datasets and style personalization
datasets, achieving high success rates even without a specific text trigger.
Human evaluation and quantitative metrics including logo detection show that
our method can stealthily embed logos.