Chuan Guo
2021
Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks against Text Transformers
Chuan Guo
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Alexandre Sablayrolles
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Hervé Jégou
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Douwe Kiela
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We propose the first general-purpose gradient-based adversarial attack against transformer models. Instead of searching for a single adversarial example, we search for a distribution of adversarial examples parameterized by a continuous-valued matrix, hence enabling gradient-based optimization. We empirically demonstrate that our white-box attack attains state-of-the-art attack performance on a variety of natural language tasks, outperforming prior work in terms of adversarial success rate with matching imperceptibility as per automated and human evaluation. Furthermore, we show that a powerful black-box transfer attack, enabled by sampling from the adversarial distribution, matches or exceeds existing methods, while only requiring hard-label outputs.
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