RobustSentEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning

Javad Rafiei Asl, Prajwal Panzade, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi, Zhipeng Cai


Abstract
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have consistently demonstrated outstanding performance across a diverse spectrum of natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, despite their success with unseen data, current PLM-based representations often exhibit poor robustness in adversarial settings. In this paper, we introduce RobustSentEmbed, a self-supervised sentence embedding framework designed to improve both generalization and robustness in diverse text representation tasks and against a diverse set of adversarial attacks. Through the generation of high-risk adversarial perturbations and their utilization in a novel objective function, RobustSentEmbed adeptly learns high-quality and robust sentence embeddings. Our experiments confirm the superiority of RobustSentEmbed over state-of-the-art representations. Specifically, Our framework achieves a significant reduction in the success rate of various adversarial attacks, notably reducing the BERTAttack success rate by almost half (from 75.51% to 38.81%). The framework also yields improvements of 1.59% and 0.23% in semantic textual similarity tasks and various transfer tasks, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.241
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3795–3809
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.241
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.241
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Javad Rafiei Asl, Prajwal Panzade, Eduardo Blanco, Daniel Takabi, and Zhipeng Cai. 2024. RobustSentEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 3795–3809, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RobustSentEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning (Rafiei Asl et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.241.pdf