The surge of state-of-the-art Transformer-based models has undoubtedly pushed the limits of NLP model performance, excelling in a variety of tasks. We cast the spotlight on the underexplored task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), since models trained on popular well-suited datasets are susceptible to adversarial attacks, allowing subtle input interventions to mislead the model. In this work, we validate the usage of natural language explanation as a model-agnostic defence strategy through extensive experimentation: only by fine-tuning a classifier on the explanation rather than premise-hypothesis inputs, robustness under various adversarial attacks is achieved in comparison to explanation-free baselines. Moreover, since there is no standard strategy of testing the semantic validity of the generated explanations, we research the correlation of widely used language generation metrics with human perception, in order for them to serve as a proxy towards robust NLI models. Our approach is resource-efficient and reproducible without significant computational limitations.

With the great advancements in large language models (LLMs), adversarial attacks against LLMs have recently attracted increasing attention. We found that pre-existing adversarial attack methodologies exhibit limited transferability and are notably inefficient, particularly when applied to LLMs. In this paper, we analyze the core mechanisms of previous predominant adversarial attack methods, revealing that 1) the distributions of importance score differ markedly among victim models, restricting the transferability; 2) the sequential attack processes induces substantial time overheads. Based on the above two insights, we introduce a new scheme, named TF-Attack, for Transferable and Fast adversarial attacks on LLMs. TF-Attack employs an external LLM as a third-party overseer rather than the victim model to identify critical units within sentences. Moreover, TF-Attack introduces the concept of Importance Level, which allows for parallel substitutions of attacks. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 widely adopted benchmarks, evaluating the proposed method through both automatic and human metrics. Results show that our method consistently surpasses previous methods in transferability and delivers significant speed improvements, up to 20 times faster than earlier attack strategies.

Adversarial attacks against deep learning models represent a major threat to the security and reliability of natural language processing (NLP) systems. In this paper, we propose a modification to the BERT-Attack framework, integrating Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) to enhance its effectiveness and robustness. The original BERT-Attack, designed for generating adversarial examples against BERT-based models, suffers from limitations such as a fixed perturbation budget and a lack of consideration for semantic similarity. The proposed approach in this work, PGD-BERT-Attack, addresses these limitations by leveraging PGD to iteratively generate adversarial examples while ensuring both imperceptibility and semantic similarity to the original input. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of PGD-BERT-Attack compared to the original BERT-Attack and other baseline methods. The results demonstrate that PGD-BERT-Attack achieves higher success rates in causing misclassification while maintaining low perceptual changes. Furthermore, PGD-BERT-Attack produces adversarial instances that exhibit greater semantic resemblance to the initial input, enhancing their applicability in real-world scenarios. Overall, the proposed modification offers a more effective and robust approach to adversarial attacks on BERT-based models, thus contributing to the advancement of defense against attacks on NLP systems.

Despite their promising performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, current NLP systems are vulnerable to textual adversarial attacks. To defend against these attacks, most existing methods apply adversarial training by incorporating adversarial examples. However, these methods have to rely on ground-truth labels to generate adversarial examples, rendering it impractical for large-scale model pre-training which is commonly used nowadays for NLP and many other tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework called SCAT (Self-supervised Contrastive Learning via Adversarial Training), which can learn robust representations without requiring labeled data. Specifically, SCAT modifies random augmentations of the data in a fully labelfree manner to generate adversarial examples. Adversarial training is achieved by minimizing the contrastive loss between the augmentations and their adversarial counterparts. We evaluate SCAT on two text classification datasets using two state-of-the-art attack schemes proposed recently. Our results show that SCAT can not only train robust language models from scratch, but it can also significantly improve the robustness of existing pre-trained language models. Moreover, to demonstrate its flexibility, we show that SCAT can also be combined with supervised adversarial training to further enhance model robustness.