Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer
Fanchao Qi, Yangyi Chen, Xurui Zhang, Mukai Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Abstract
Adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks are two common security threats that hang over deep learning. Both of them harness task-irrelevant features of data in their implementation. Text style is a feature that is naturally irrelevant to most NLP tasks, and thus suitable for adversarial and backdoor attacks. In this paper, we make the first attempt to conduct adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer, which is aimed at altering the style of a sentence while preserving its meaning. We design an adversarial attack method and a backdoor attack method, and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate them. Experimental results show that popular NLP models are vulnerable to both adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer—the attack success rates can exceed 90% without much effort. It reflects the limited ability of NLP models to handle the feature of text style that has not been widely realized. In addition, the style transfer-based adversarial and backdoor attack methods show superiority to baselines in many aspects. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/StyleAttack.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.374
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4569–4580
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.374
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.374
- Cite (ACL):
- Fanchao Qi, Yangyi Chen, Xurui Zhang, Mukai Li, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2021. Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4569–4580, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer (Qi et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2021.emnlp-main.374.pdf
- Code
- thunlp/styleattack
- Data
- Hate Speech, SST, SST-2