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A Geometry-Inspired Attack for Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples

Meng Zhao, Roger Wattenhofer

202022 citationsDOIOpen Access PDF

Abstract

Generating adversarial examples for natural language is hard, as natural language consists of discrete symbols, and examples are often of variable lengths. In this paper, we propose a geometryinspired attack for generating natural language adversarial examples. Our attack generates adversarial examples by iteratively approximating the decision boundary of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Experiments on two datasets with two different models show that our attack fools natural language models with high success rates, while only replacing a few words. Human evaluation shows that adversarial examples generated by our attack are hard for humans to recognize. Further experiments show that adversarial training can improve model robustness against our attack.

Topics & Concepts

Adversarial systemRobustness (evolution)Natural languageComputer scienceArtificial intelligenceNatural (archaeology)Language modelDeep neural networksNatural language understandingBoundary (topology)Artificial neural networkTheoretical computer scienceNatural language processingMathematicsChemistryBiochemistryArchaeologyHistoryGeneMathematical analysisAdversarial Robustness in Machine LearningTopic ModelingNatural Language Processing Techniques