Armor: Shielding Unlearnable Examples Against Data Augmentation

Unlearnable examples are protective noises added to private data to prevent AI models from learning useful information from them, but this paper shows that data augmentation (a common technique that creates variations of training data to improve model performance) can undo this protection and restore learnability from 21.3% to 66.1% accuracy. The researchers propose Armor, a defense framework that adds protective noise while accounting for data augmentation effects, using a surrogate model (a practice model used to simulate the real training process) and smart augmentation selection to keep private data unlearnable even after augmentation is applied.