Papers › Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks against Text Transformers

Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks against Text Transformers

15 Apr 2021EMNLP 2021 11arXiv:2104.13733archive 2025-07-28

Chuan Guo, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Hervé Jégou, Douwe Kiela

We propose the first general-purpose gradient-based attack against transformer models. Instead of searching for a single adversarial example, we search for a distribution of adversarial examples parameterized by a continuous-valued matrix, hence enabling gradient-based optimization. We empirically demonstrate that our white-box attack attains state-of-the-art attack performance on a variety of natural language tasks. Furthermore, we show that a powerful black-box transfer attack, enabled by sampling from the adversarial distribution, matches or exceeds existing methods, while only requiring hard-label outputs.

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