Generating Label Cohesive and Well-Formed Adversarial Claims

Pepa Atanasova, Dustin Wright, Isabelle Augenstein


Abstract
Adversarial attacks reveal important vulnerabilities and flaws of trained models. One potent type of attack are universal adversarial triggers, which are individual n-grams that, when appended to instances of a class under attack, can trick a model into predicting a target class. However, for inference tasks such as fact checking, these triggers often inadvertently invert the meaning of instances they are inserted in. In addition, such attacks produce semantically nonsensical inputs, as they simply concatenate triggers to existing samples. Here, we investigate how to generate adversarial attacks against fact checking systems that preserve the ground truth meaning and are semantically valid. We extend the HotFlip attack algorithm used for universal trigger generation by jointly minimizing the target class loss of a fact checking model and the entailment class loss of an auxiliary natural language inference model. We then train a conditional language model to generate semantically valid statements, which include the found universal triggers. We find that the generated attacks maintain the directionality and semantic validity of the claim better than previous work.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.256
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3168–3177
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.256
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.256
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pepa Atanasova, Dustin Wright, and Isabelle Augenstein. 2020. Generating Label Cohesive and Well-Formed Adversarial Claims. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 3168–3177, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Label Cohesive and Well-Formed Adversarial Claims (Atanasova et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.emnlp-main.256.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938949
Code
 copenlu/fever-adversarial-attacks
Data
FEVER