A Geometry-Inspired Attack for Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples

Zhao Meng, Roger Wattenhofer


Abstract
Generating adversarial examples for natural language is hard, as natural language consists of discrete symbols, and examples are often of variable lengths. In this paper, we propose a geometry-inspired attack for generating natural language adversarial examples. Our attack generates adversarial examples by iteratively approximating the decision boundary of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Experiments on two datasets with two different models show that our attack fools natural language models with high success rates, while only replacing a few words. Human evaluation shows that adversarial examples generated by our attack are hard for humans to recognize. Further experiments show that adversarial training can improve model robustness against our attack.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.585
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6679–6689
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.585
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.585
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhao Meng and Roger Wattenhofer. 2020. A Geometry-Inspired Attack for Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6679–6689, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Geometry-Inspired Attack for Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples (Meng & Wattenhofer, COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.585.pdf
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