Jianming Lv
2025
The Silent Saboteur: Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks against Black-Box Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Hongru Song
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Yu-An Liu
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Ruqing Zhang
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Jiafeng Guo
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Jianming Lv
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Maarten de Rijke
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Xueqi Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
We explore adversarial attacks against retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems to identify their vulnerabilities. We focus on generating human-imperceptible adversarial examples and introduce a novel imperceptible retrieve-to-generate attack against RAG. This task aims to find imperceptible perturbations that retrieve a target document, originally excluded from the initial top-k candidate set, in order to influence the final answer generation. To address this task, we propose ReGENT, a reinforcement learning-based framework that tracks interactions between the attacker and the target RAG and continuously refines attack strategies based on relevance-generation-naturalness rewards. Experiments on newly constructed factual and non-factual question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that ReGENT significantly outperforms existing attack methods in misleading RAG systems with small imperceptible text perturbations.
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- Xueqi Cheng 1
- Jiafeng Guo (嘉丰 郭) 1
- Yu-An Liu 1
- Hongru Song 1
- Ruqing Zhang (儒清 张) 1
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