Reevaluating Adversarial Examples in Natural Language
John Morris, Eli Lifland, Jack Lanchantin, Yangfeng Ji, Yanjun Qi
Abstract
State-of-the-art attacks on NLP models lack a shared definition of a what constitutes a successful attack. We distill ideas from past work into a unified framework: a successful natural language adversarial example is a perturbation that fools the model and follows some linguistic constraints. We then analyze the outputs of two state-of-the-art synonym substitution attacks. We find that their perturbations often do not preserve semantics, and 38% introduce grammatical errors. Human surveys reveal that to successfully preserve semantics, we need to significantly increase the minimum cosine similarities between the embeddings of swapped words and between the sentence encodings of original and perturbed sentences. With constraints adjusted to better preserve semantics and grammaticality, the attack success rate drops by over 70 percentage points.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.findings-emnlp.341
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3829–3839
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.341
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.341
- Cite (ACL):
- John Morris, Eli Lifland, Jack Lanchantin, Yangfeng Ji, and Yanjun Qi. 2020. Reevaluating Adversarial Examples in Natural Language. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 3829–3839, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Reevaluating Adversarial Examples in Natural Language (Morris et al., Findings 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2020.findings-emnlp.341.pdf
- Code
- QData/TextAttack + additional community code
- Data
- MultiNLI, SNLI