Jingsong Wei
2026
PivotAttack: Rethinking the Search Trajectory in Hard-Label Text Attacks via Pivot Words
Yuzhi Liang | Shiliang Xiao | Jingsong Wei | Qiliang Lin | Xia Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuzhi Liang | Shiliang Xiao | Jingsong Wei | Qiliang Lin | Xia Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Existing hard-label text attacks often rely on inefficient "outside-in" strategies that traverse vast search spaces. We propose PivotAttack, a query-efficient "inside-out" framework. It employs a Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm to identify Pivot Sets—combinatorial token groups acting as prediction anchors—and strategically perturbs them to induce label flips. This approach captures inter-word dependencies and minimizes query costs. Extensive experiments across traditional models and Large Language Models demonstrate that PivotAttack consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both Attack Success Rate and query efficiency.