Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP

Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Fanchao Qi, Longtao Huang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Textual adversarial samples play important roles in multiple subfields of NLP research, including security, evaluation, explainability, and data augmentation. However, most work mixes all these roles, obscuring the problem definitions and research goals of the security role that aims to reveal the practical concerns of NLP models. In this paper, we rethink the research paradigm of textual adversarial samples in security scenarios. We discuss the deficiencies in previous work and propose our suggestions that the research on the Security-oriented adversarial NLP (SoadNLP) should: (1) evaluate their methods on security tasks to demonstrate the real-world concerns; (2) consider real-world attackers’ goals, instead of developing impractical methods. To this end, we first collect, process, and release a security datasets collection Advbench. Then, we reformalize the task and adjust the emphasis on different goals in SoadNLP. Next, we propose a simple method based on heuristic rules that can easily fulfill the actual adversarial goals to simulate real-world attack methods. We conduct experiments on both the attack and the defense sides on Advbench. Experimental results show that our method has higher practical value, indicating that the research paradigm in SoadNLP may start from our new benchmark. All the code and data of Advbench can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/Advbench.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.771
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11222–11237
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.771
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.771
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Fanchao Qi, Longtao Huang, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2022. Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11222–11237, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP (Chen et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.771.pdf