Adversarial examples expose the vulnerabilities of natural language processing (NLP) models, and can be used to evaluate and improve their robustness. Existing techniques of generating such examples are typically driven by local heuristic rules that are agnostic to the context, often resulting in unnatural and ungrammatical outputs… This paper presents CLARE, a ContextuaLized AdversaRial Example generation model that produces fluent and grammatical outputs through a mask-then-infill procedure. CLARE builds on a pre-trained masked language model and modifies the inputs in […]

We propose a simple and highly query-efficient black-box adversarial attack named SWITCH, which has a state-of-the-art performance under $ell_2$ and $ell_infty$ norms in the score-based setting. In the black box attack setting, designing query-efficient attacks remains an open problem… The high query efficiency of the proposed approach stems from the combination of transfer-based attacks and random-search-based ones. The surrogate model’s gradient $hat{mathbf{g}}$ is exploited for the guidance, which is then switched if our algorithm detects that it does not point […]