From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework

Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Heng Ji


Abstract
Textual adversarial attacks can discover models’ weaknesses by adding semantic-preserved but misleading perturbations to the inputs. The long-lasting adversarial attack-and-defense arms race in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is algorithm-centric, providing valuable techniques for automatic robustness evaluation. However, the existing practice of robustness evaluation may exhibit issues of incomprehensive evaluation, impractical evaluation protocol, and invalid adversarial samples. In this paper, we aim to set up a unified automatic robustness evaluation framework, shifting towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks. To address the above challenges, we first determine robustness evaluation dimensions based on model capabilities and specify the reasonable algorithm to generate adversarial samples for each dimension. Then we establish the evaluation protocol, including evaluation settings and metrics, under realistic demands. Finally, we use the perturbation degree of adversarial samples to control the sample validity. We implement a toolkit RobTest that realizes our automatic robustness evaluation framework. In our experiments, we conduct a robustness evaluation of RoBERTa models to demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation framework, and further show the rationality of each component in the framework.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.611
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9607–9632
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.611
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.611
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, and Heng Ji. 2023. From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9607–9632, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (Chen et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.611.pdf