{"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/towards-robustness-against-natural-language-1","title":"Towards Robustness Against Natural Language Word Substitutions","arxiv_id":"2107.13541","date":"2021-07-28","proceeding":"ICLR 2021 1","authors":["Xinshuai Dong","Anh Tuan Luu","Rongrong Ji","Hong Liu"],"abstract":"Robustness against word substitutions has a well-defined and widely acceptable form, i.e., using semantically similar words as substitutions, and thus it is considered as a fundamental stepping-stone towards broader robustness in natural language processing. Previous defense methods capture word substitutions in vector space by using either $l_2$-ball or hyper-rectangle, which results in perturbation sets that are not inclusive enough or unnecessarily large, and thus impedes mimicry of worst cases for robust training. In this paper, we introduce a novel \\textit{Adversarial Sparse Convex Combination} (ASCC) method. We model the word substitution attack space as a convex hull and leverages a regularization term to enforce perturbation towards an actual substitution, thus aligning our modeling better with the discrete textual space. Based on the ASCC method, we further propose ASCC-defense, which leverages ASCC to generate worst-case perturbations and incorporates adversarial training towards robustness. Experiments show that ASCC-defense outperforms the current state-of-the-arts in terms of robustness on two prevailing NLP tasks, \\emph{i.e.}, sentiment analysis and natural language inference, concerning several attacks across multiple model architectures. Besides, we also envision a new class of defense towards robustness in NLP, where our robustly trained word vectors can be plugged into a normally trained model and enforce its robustness without applying any other defense techniques.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13541v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.13541v1.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":"towards-robustness-against-natural-language-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/dongxinshuai/ASCC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"natural-language-inference","task_name":"Natural Language Inference"},{"task_slug":"sentiment-analysis","task_name":"Sentiment Analysis"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2107.13541","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2107.13541"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/dongxinshuai/ASCC","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"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"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0107b82eef629356","entry":"set_params","repo":"dongxinshuai/ASCC","repo_kind":"official","path":"train_imdb_ascc.py","file_url":"https://github.com/dongxinshuai/ASCC/blob/HEAD/train_imdb_ascc.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0107b82eef629356"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}