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Towards Building a Robust Toxicity Predictor

Dmitriy Bespalov, Sourav Bhabesh, Yi Xiang, Liutong Zhou, Yanjun Qi


Abstract
Recent NLP literature pays little attention to the robustness of toxicity language predictors, while these systems are most likely to be used in adversarial contexts. This paper presents a novel adversarial attack, \texttt{ToxicTrap}, introducing small word-level perturbations to fool SOTA text classifiers to predict toxic text samples as benign. \texttt{ToxicTrap} exploits greedy based search strategies to enable fast and effective generation of toxic adversarial examples. Two novel goal function designs allow \texttt{ToxicTrap} to identify weaknesses in both multiclass and multilabel toxic language detectors. Our empirical results show that SOTA toxicity text classifiers are indeed vulnerable to the proposed attacks, attaining over 98\% attack success rates in multilabel cases. We also show how a vanilla adversarial training and its improved version can help increase robustness of a toxicity detector even against unseen attacks.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-industry.56
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Sunayana Sitaram, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Jason D Williams
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
581–598
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.56
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-industry.56
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dmitriy Bespalov, Sourav Bhabesh, Yi Xiang, Liutong Zhou, and Yanjun Qi. 2023. Towards Building a Robust Toxicity Predictor. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 581–598, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Building a Robust Toxicity Predictor (Bespalov et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.56.pdf