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Towards Robustness of Text-to-SQL Models Against Natural and Realistic Adversarial Table Perturbation

20 Dec 2022ACL 2022 5arXiv:2212.09994archive 2025-07-28

Xinyu Pi, Bing Wang, Yan Gao, Jiaqi Guo, Zhoujun Li, Jian-Guang Lou

The robustness of Text-to-SQL parsers against adversarial perturbations plays a crucial role in delivering highly reliable applications. Previous studies along this line primarily focused on perturbations in the natural language question side, neglecting the variability of tables. Motivated by this, we propose the Adversarial Table Perturbation (ATP) as a new attacking paradigm to measure the robustness of Text-to-SQL models. Following this proposition, we curate ADVETA, the first robustness evaluation benchmark featuring natural and realistic ATPs. All tested state-of-the-art models experience dramatic performance drops on ADVETA, revealing models' vulnerability in real-world practices. To defend against ATP, we build a systematic adversarial training example generation framework tailored for better contextualization of tabular data. Experiments show that our approach not only brings the best robustness improvement against table-side perturbations but also substantially empowers models against NL-side perturbations. We release our benchmark and code at: https://github.com/microsoft/ContextualSP.

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SmartPerturbation microsoft/ContextualSP/adaptershare/mt_dnn/perturbation.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · e0be17029a345e06 · report
generate_noise microsoft/ContextualSP/adaptershare/mt_dnn/perturbation.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 417ac95acb8c20b4 · report
stable_kl microsoft/ContextualSP/adaptershare/mt_dnn/perturbation.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 7b0111630cee9629 · report
EncoderModelType microsoft/ContextualSP/adaptershare/mt_dnn/perturbation.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 16d7e293217bcfda · report
TaskType microsoft/ContextualSP/adaptershare/mt_dnn/perturbation.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 9c21f574753121d3 · report

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Text to SQLText-To-SQL

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