{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/adversarial-robustness-of-prompt-based-few","title":"Adversarial Robustness of Prompt-based Few-Shot Learning for Natural Language Understanding","arxiv_id":"2306.11066","date":"2023-06-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Venkata Prabhakara Sarath Nookala","Gaurav Verma","Subhabrata Mukherjee","Srijan Kumar"],"abstract":"State-of-the-art few-shot learning (FSL) methods leverage prompt-based fine-tuning to obtain remarkable results for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While much of the prior FSL methods focus on improving downstream task performance, there is a limited understanding of the adversarial robustness of such methods. In this work, we conduct an extensive study of several state-of-the-art FSL methods to assess their robustness to adversarial perturbations. To better understand the impact of various factors towards robustness (or the lack of it), we evaluate prompt-based FSL methods against fully fine-tuned models for aspects such as the use of unlabeled data, multiple prompts, number of few-shot examples, model size and type. Our results on six GLUE tasks indicate that compared to fully fine-tuned models, vanilla FSL methods lead to a notable relative drop in task performance (i.e., are less robust) in the face of adversarial perturbations. However, using (i) unlabeled data for prompt-based FSL and (ii) multiple prompts flip the trend. We further demonstrate that increasing the number of few-shot examples and model size lead to increased adversarial robustness of vanilla FSL methods. Broadly, our work sheds light on the adversarial robustness evaluation of prompt-based FSL methods for NLU tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11066v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.11066v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"adversarial-robustness-of-prompt-based-few","repo_url":"https://github.com/claws-lab/few-shot-adversarial-robustness","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"adversarial-robustness","task_name":"Adversarial Robustness"},{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-understanding","task_name":"Natural Language Understanding"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"flip","method_name":"FLIP"},{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.11066","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}