Papers › Adversarial Reprogramming of Text Classification Neural Networks

Adversarial Reprogramming of Text Classification Neural Networks

6 Sep 2018IJCNLP 2019 11arXiv:1809.01829archive 2025-07-28

Paarth Neekhara, Shehzeen Hussain, Shlomo Dubnov, Farinaz Koushanfar

Adversarial Reprogramming has demonstrated success in utilizing pre-trained neural network classifiers for alternative classification tasks without modification to the original network. An adversary in such an attack scenario trains an additive contribution to the inputs to repurpose the neural network for the new classification task. While this reprogramming approach works for neural networks with a continuous input space such as that of images, it is not directly applicable to neural networks trained for tasks such as text classification, where the input space is discrete. Repurposing such classification networks would require the attacker to learn an adversarial program that maps inputs from one discrete space to the other. In this work, we introduce a context-based vocabulary remapping model to reprogram neural networks trained on a specific sequence classification task, for a new sequence classification task desired by the adversary. We propose training procedures for this adversarial program in both white-box and black-box settings. We demonstrate the application of our model by adversarially repurposing various text-classification models including LSTM, bi-directional LSTM and CNN for alternate classification tasks.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

paarthneekhara/rnn_adversarial_reprogramming officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ClassificationGeneral ClassificationText Classificationtext-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections