{"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/exploring-and-improving-robustness-of-multi","title":"Exploring and Improving Robustness of Multi Task Deep Neural Networks via Domain Agnostic Defenses","arxiv_id":"2001.05286","date":"2020-01-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kashyap Coimbatore Murali"],"abstract":"In this paper, we explore the robustness of the Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks (MT-DNN) against non-targeted adversarial attacks across Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks as well as some possible ways to defend against them. Liu et al., have shown that the Multi-Task Deep Neural Network, due to the regularization effect produced when training as a result of its cross task data, is more robust than a vanilla BERT model trained only on one task (1.1%-1.5% absolute difference). We further show that although the MT-DNN has generalized better, making it easily transferable across domains and tasks, it can still be compromised as after only 2 attacks (1-character and 2-character) the accuracy drops by 42.05% and 32.24% for the SNLI and SciTail tasks. Finally, we propose a domain agnostic defense which restores the model's accuracy (36.75% and 25.94% respectively) as opposed to a general-purpose defense or an off-the-shelf spell checker.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.05286v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.05286v1.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":"exploring-and-improving-robustness-of-multi","repo_url":"https://github.com/katchu11/Robustness-of-MT-DNNs","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"natural-language-understanding","task_name":"Natural Language Understanding"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}