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Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer

Fanchao Qi, Yangyi Chen, Xurui Zhang, Mukai Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks are two common security threats that hang over deep learning. Both of them harness task-irrelevant features of data in their implementation. Text style is a feature that is naturally irrelevant to most NLP tasks, and thus suitable for adversarial and backdoor attacks. In this paper, we make the first attempt to conduct adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer, which is aimed at altering the style of a sentence while preserving its meaning. We design an adversarial attack method and a backdoor attack method, and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate them. Experimental results show that popular NLP models are vulnerable to both adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer—the attack success rates can exceed 90% without much effort. It reflects the limited ability of NLP models to handle the feature of text style that has not been widely realized. In addition, the style transfer-based adversarial and backdoor attack methods show superiority to baselines in many aspects. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/StyleAttack.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.374
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4569–4580
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.374
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.374
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fanchao Qi, Yangyi Chen, Xurui Zhang, Mukai Li, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2021. Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4569–4580, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer (Qi et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.374.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.374.mp4
Code
 thunlp/styleattack
Data
Hate SpeechSSTSST-2