ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks

Fanchao Qi, Yangyi Chen, Mukai Li, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent training-time threat to deep neural networks (DNNs). They can manipulate the output of DNNs and possess high insidiousness. In the field of natural language processing, some attack methods have been proposed and achieve very high attack success rates on multiple popular models. Nevertheless, there are few studies on defending against textual backdoor attacks. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective textual backdoor defense named ONION, which is based on outlier word detection and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first method that can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in defending BiLSTM and BERT against five different backdoor attacks. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/ONION.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.752
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:
9558–9566
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.752
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.752
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fanchao Qi, Yangyi Chen, Mukai Li, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2021. ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9558–9566, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks (Qi et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.752.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.752.mp4
Code
 thunlp/ONION +  additional community code
Data
AG NewsSSTSST-2