Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution
Zongyi Li, Jianhan Xu, Jiehang Zeng, Linyang Li, Xiaoqing Zheng, Qi Zhang, Kai-Wei Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Abstract
Recent studies have shown that deep neural network-based models are vulnerable to intentionally crafted adversarial examples, and various methods have been proposed to defend against adversarial word-substitution attacks for neural NLP models. However, there is a lack of systematic study on comparing different defense approaches under the same attacking setting. In this paper, we seek to fill the gap of systematic studies through comprehensive researches on understanding the behavior of neural text classifiers trained by various defense methods under representative adversarial attacks. In addition, we propose an effective method to further improve the robustness of neural text classifiers against such attacks, and achieved the highest accuracy on both clean and adversarial examples on AGNEWS and IMDB datasets by a significant margin. We hope this study could provide useful clues for future research on text adversarial defense. Codes are available at https://github.com/RockyLzy/TextDefender.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.251
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3137–3147
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.251
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.251
- Cite (ACL):
- Zongyi Li, Jianhan Xu, Jiehang Zeng, Linyang Li, Xiaoqing Zheng, Qi Zhang, Kai-Wei Chang, and Cho-Jui Hsieh. 2021. Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3137–3147, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution (Li et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2021.emnlp-main.251.pdf
- Code
- rockylzy/textdefender
- Data
- AG News, IMDb Movie Reviews