A More Context-Aware Approach for Textual Adversarial Attacks Using Probability Difference-Guided Beam Search

Huijun Liu, Bin Ji, Jie Yu, Shasha Li, Jun Ma, Zibo Yi, Mengxue Du, Miaomiao Li, Jie Liu, Zeyao Mo

Abstract: Textual adversarial attacks expose the vulnerabilities of text classifiers and can be used to improve their robustness. Previous context-aware attack models suffer from several limitations. They generally rely on out-of-date substitutes, solely consider the gold label probability, and use the greedy search when generating adversarial examples, often limiting the attack efficiency. To tackle these issues, we propose MC-PDBS , a M ore C ontext-aware textual adversarial attack model using P robability D ifference-guided B eam S earch. MC-PDBS generates substitutes using the newest perturbed text sequences in each attack iteration, enabling the generation of more context-aware adversarial examples. The probability difference is an overall consideration of the probabilities of all class labels, which is more effective than the gold label probability in guiding the selection of attack paths. In addition, the beam search enables MC-PDBS to search attack paths from multiple search channels, thereby avoiding the limited search space problem. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that MC-PDBS outperforms previous best models in a series of evaluation metrics, particularly bringing up to a +19.5% attack success rate. Extensive analyses further confirm the effectiveness of MC-PDBS.