@inproceedings{formento-etal-2024-semrode,
title = "{S}em{R}o{D}e: Macro Adversarial Training to Learn Representations that are Robust to Word-Level Attacks",
author = "Formento, Brian and
Feng, Wenjie and
Foo, Chuan-Sheng and
Luu, Anh Tuan and
Ng, See-Kiong",
editor = "Duh, Kevin and
Gomez, Helena and
Bethard, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jun,
year = "2024",
address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.443",
pages = "7998--8021",
abstract = "Language models (LMs) are indispensable tools for natural language processing tasks, but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks remains a concern. While current research has explored adversarial training techniques, their improvements to defend against word-level attacks have been limited. In this work, we propose a novel approach called Semantic Robust Defence (SemRoDe), a Macro Adversarial Training strategy to enhance the robustness of LMs. Drawing inspiration from recent studies in the image domain, we investigate and later confirm that in a discrete data setting such as language, adversarial samples generated via word substitutions do indeed belong to an adversarial domain exhibiting a high Wasserstein distance from the base domain. Our method learns a robust representation that bridges these two domains. We hypothesize that if samples were not projected into an adversarial domain, but instead to a domain with minimal shift, it would improve attack robustness. We align the domains by incorporating a new distance-based objective. With this, our model is able to learn more generalized representations by aligning the model{'}s high-level output features and therefore better handling unseen adversarial samples. This method can be generalized across word embeddings, even when they share minimal overlap at both vocabulary and word-substitution levels. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on BERT and RoBERTa models on three datasets. The results demonstrate promising state-of-the-art robustness.",
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="formento-etal-2024-semrode">
<titleInfo>
<title>SemRoDe: Macro Adversarial Training to Learn Representations that are Robust to Word-Level Attacks</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Brian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Formento</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Wenjie</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Feng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Chuan-Sheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Foo</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Anh</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Tuan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Luu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">See-Kiong</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2024-06</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kevin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Duh</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Helena</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gomez</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Steven</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bethard</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Mexico City, Mexico</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Language models (LMs) are indispensable tools for natural language processing tasks, but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks remains a concern. While current research has explored adversarial training techniques, their improvements to defend against word-level attacks have been limited. In this work, we propose a novel approach called Semantic Robust Defence (SemRoDe), a Macro Adversarial Training strategy to enhance the robustness of LMs. Drawing inspiration from recent studies in the image domain, we investigate and later confirm that in a discrete data setting such as language, adversarial samples generated via word substitutions do indeed belong to an adversarial domain exhibiting a high Wasserstein distance from the base domain. Our method learns a robust representation that bridges these two domains. We hypothesize that if samples were not projected into an adversarial domain, but instead to a domain with minimal shift, it would improve attack robustness. We align the domains by incorporating a new distance-based objective. With this, our model is able to learn more generalized representations by aligning the model’s high-level output features and therefore better handling unseen adversarial samples. This method can be generalized across word embeddings, even when they share minimal overlap at both vocabulary and word-substitution levels. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on BERT and RoBERTa models on three datasets. The results demonstrate promising state-of-the-art robustness.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">formento-etal-2024-semrode</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.443</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2024-06</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>7998</start>
<end>8021</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T SemRoDe: Macro Adversarial Training to Learn Representations that are Robust to Word-Level Attacks
%A Formento, Brian
%A Feng, Wenjie
%A Foo, Chuan-Sheng
%A Luu, Anh Tuan
%A Ng, See-Kiong
%Y Duh, Kevin
%Y Gomez, Helena
%Y Bethard, Steven
%S Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2024
%8 June
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Mexico City, Mexico
%F formento-etal-2024-semrode
%X Language models (LMs) are indispensable tools for natural language processing tasks, but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks remains a concern. While current research has explored adversarial training techniques, their improvements to defend against word-level attacks have been limited. In this work, we propose a novel approach called Semantic Robust Defence (SemRoDe), a Macro Adversarial Training strategy to enhance the robustness of LMs. Drawing inspiration from recent studies in the image domain, we investigate and later confirm that in a discrete data setting such as language, adversarial samples generated via word substitutions do indeed belong to an adversarial domain exhibiting a high Wasserstein distance from the base domain. Our method learns a robust representation that bridges these two domains. We hypothesize that if samples were not projected into an adversarial domain, but instead to a domain with minimal shift, it would improve attack robustness. We align the domains by incorporating a new distance-based objective. With this, our model is able to learn more generalized representations by aligning the model’s high-level output features and therefore better handling unseen adversarial samples. This method can be generalized across word embeddings, even when they share minimal overlap at both vocabulary and word-substitution levels. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on BERT and RoBERTa models on three datasets. The results demonstrate promising state-of-the-art robustness.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.443
%P 7998-8021
Markdown (Informal)
[SemRoDe: Macro Adversarial Training to Learn Representations that are Robust to Word-Level Attacks](https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.443) (Formento et al., NAACL 2024)
ACL