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Abstract

We study the behavior of several black-box search algorithms used for generating adversarial examples for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We perform a fine-grained analysis of three elements relevant to search: search algorithm, search space, and search budget. When new search algorithms are proposed in past work, the attack search space is often modified alongside the search algorithm. Without ablation studies benchmarking the search algorithm change with the search space held constant, one cannot tell if an increase in attack success rate is a result of an improved search algorithm or a less restrictive search space. Additionally, many previous studies fail to properly consider the search algorithms' run-time cost, which is essential for downstream tasks like adversarial training. Our experiments provide a reproducible benchmark of search algorithms across a variety of search spaces and query budgets to guide future research in adversarial NLP. Based on our experiments, we recommend greedy attacks with word importance ranking when under a time constraint or attacking long inputs, and either beam search or particle swarm optimization otherwise. Code implementation shared via https://github.com/QData/TextAttack-Search-Benchmark

Details

1009240
Title
Searching for a Search Method: Benchmarking Search Algorithms for Generating NLP Adversarial Examples
Publication title
arXiv.org; Ithaca
Publication year
2020
Publication date
Oct 12, 2020
Section
Computer Science
Publisher
Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
Source
arXiv.org
Place of publication
Ithaca
Country of publication
United States
University/institution
Cornell University Library arXiv.org
e-ISSN
2331-8422
Source type
Working Paper
Language of publication
English
Document type
Working Paper
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2020-10-14
Milestone dates
2020-09-09 (Submission v1); 2020-10-12 (Submission v2)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
14 Oct 2020
ProQuest document ID
2442688337
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/working-papers/searching-search-method-benchmarking-algorithms/docview/2442688337/se-2?accountid=208611
Full text outside of ProQuest
Copyright
© 2020. This work is published under http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2023-11-17
Database
2 databases
  • ProQuest One Academic
  • ProQuest One Academic