Hongru Song


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2025

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The Silent Saboteur: Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks against Black-Box Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Hongru Song | Yu-An Liu | Ruqing Zhang | Jiafeng Guo | Jianming Lv | Maarten de Rijke | 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.