Papers › Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text...
Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment
Di Jin, Zhijing Jin, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Peter Szolovits
Machine learning algorithms are often vulnerable to adversarial examples that have imperceptible alterations from the original counterparts but can fool the state-of-the-art models. It is helpful to evaluate or even improve the robustness of these models by exposing the maliciously crafted adversarial examples. In this paper, we present TextFooler, a simple but strong baseline to generate natural adversarial text. By applying it to two fundamental natural language tasks, text classification and textual entailment, we successfully attacked three target models, including the powerful pre-trained BERT, and the widely used convolutional and recurrent neural networks. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework in three ways: (1) effective---it outperforms state-of-the-art attacks in terms of success rate and perturbation rate, (2) utility-preserving---it preserves semantic content and grammaticality, and remains correctly classified by humans, and (3) efficient---it generates adversarial text with computational complexity linear to the text length. *The code, pre-trained target models, and test examples are available at https://github.com/jind11/TextFooler.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="1907.11932")
Code
Syntology Ran 2 of 2 code samples harvested from 0 repositories linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran · fixture could not drive it.
By repository: 2 identical to code first harvested elsewhere. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
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
2 samples harvested; 2 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 2 of the 2 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
87b2750a51e1c3e9 · report
cee2b1928c7dcb6a · report
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
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