Tougher Text, Smarter Models: Raising the Bar for Adversarial Defence Benchmarks

Yang Wang, Chenghua Lin


Abstract
Recent advancements in natural language processing have highlighted the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial attacks. While various defence mechanisms have been proposed, there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks that evaluate these defences across diverse datasets, models, and tasks. In this work, we address this gap by presenting an extensive benchmark for textual adversarial defence that significantly expands upon previous work. Our benchmark incorporates a wide range of datasets, evaluates state-of-the-art defence mechanisms, and extends the assessment to include critical tasks such as single-sentence classification, similarity and paraphrase identification, natural language inference, and commonsense reasoning. This work not only serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of adversarial robustness but also identifies key areas for future research in textual adversarial defence. By establishing a new standard for benchmarking in this domain, we aim to accelerate progress towards more robust and reliable natural language processing systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.432
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6475–6491
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.432/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Wang and Chenghua Lin. 2025. Tougher Text, Smarter Models: Raising the Bar for Adversarial Defence Benchmarks. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6475–6491, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tougher Text, Smarter Models: Raising the Bar for Adversarial Defence Benchmarks (Wang & Lin, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.432.pdf