Shagufta Mehnaz
2026
LogicEval: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating Automated Repair Techniques for Logical Vulnerabilities in Real-World Software
Syed Md Mukit Rashid | Abdullah Al Ishtiaq | Kai Tu | Yilu Dong | Tianwei Wu | Ali Ranjbar | Tianchang Yang | Najrin Sultana | Shagufta Mehnaz | Syed Rafiul Hussain
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Syed Md Mukit Rashid | Abdullah Al Ishtiaq | Kai Tu | Yilu Dong | Tianwei Wu | Ali Ranjbar | Tianchang Yang | Najrin Sultana | Shagufta Mehnaz | Syed Rafiul Hussain
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Logical vulnerabilities in software stem from flaws in program logic rather than memory safety, which can lead to critical security failures. Although existing automated program-repair techniques primarily focus on repairing memory-corruption vulnerabilities, they struggle with logical vulnerabilities because of their limited semantic understanding of the vulnerable code and its expected behavior. On the other hand, recent successes of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and repairing code are promising. However, no framework currently exists to analyze the capabilities and limitations of such techniques for logical vulnerabilities. We aim to systematically evaluate both traditional and LLM-based repair approaches for addressing real-world logical vulnerabilities. To facilitate our assessment, we created the first-ever dataset, LogicDS, comprising 122 logical vulnerabilities that reflect tangible security impact. We also developed a systematic framework, LogicEval, to evaluate patches for logical vulnerabilities. Evaluations suggest that compilation and testing failures are primarily driven by prompt sensitivity, loss of code context, and difficulty in patch localization.
2025
From Insight to Exploit: Leveraging LLM Collaboration for Adaptive Adversarial Text Generation
Najrin Sultana | Md Rafi Ur Rashid | Kang Gu | Shagufta Mehnaz
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Najrin Sultana | Md Rafi Ur Rashid | Kang Gu | Shagufta Mehnaz
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
LLMs can provide substantial zero-shot performance on diverse tasks using a simple task prompt, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning. However, when applying these models to sensitive tasks, it is crucial to thoroughly assess their robustness against adversarial inputs. In this work, we introduce Static Deceptor (StaDec) and Dynamic Deceptor (DyDec), two innovative attack frameworks designed to systematically generate dynamic and adaptive adversarial examples by leveraging the understanding of the LLMs. We produce subtle and natural-looking adversarial inputs that preserve semantic similarity to the original text while effectively deceiving the target LLM. By utilizing an automated, LLM-driven pipeline, we eliminate the dependence on external heuristics. Our attacks evolve with the advancements in LLMs, while demonstrating a strong transferability across models unknown to the attacker. Overall, this work provides a systematic approach for self-assessing the robustness of the LLMs. We release our code and data at https://github.com/Shukti042/AdversarialExample.
2024
Semantic-Preserving Adversarial Example Attack against BERT
Chongyang Gao | Kang Gu | Soroush Vosoughi | Shagufta Mehnaz
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2024)
Chongyang Gao | Kang Gu | Soroush Vosoughi | Shagufta Mehnaz
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2024)
Adversarial example attacks against textual data have been drawing increasing attention in both the natural language processing (NLP) and security domains. However, most of the existing attacks overlook the importance of semantic similarity and yield easily recognizable adversarial samples. As a result, the defense methods developed in response to these attacks remain vulnerable and could be evaded by advanced adversarial examples that maintain high semantic similarity with the original, non-adversarial text. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the extent of textual adversarial examples in maintaining such high semantic similarity. We propose Reinforce attack, a reinforcement learning-based framework to generate adversarial text that preserves high semantic similarity with the original text. In particular, the attack process is controlled by a reward function rather than heuristics, as in previous methods, to encourage higher semantic similarity and lower query costs. Through automatic and human evaluations, we show that our generated adversarial texts preserve significantly higher semantic similarity than state-of-the-art attacks while achieving similar attack success rates (outperforming at times), thus uncovering novel challenges for effective defenses.