2022/08/17 by Huijun Liu, Jie Yu, Liu, Huijun +7
Computer Science · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Spam and Phishing Detection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2208.08029
openalex publication_date 2022/08/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Textual adversarial attacks expose the vulnerabilities of text classifiers and can be used to improve their robustness. Existing context-aware methods solely consider the gold label probability and use the greedy search when searching an attack path, often limiting the attack efficiency. To tackle these issues, we propose PDBS, a context-aware textual adversarial attack model using Probability Difference guided Beam Search. The probability difference is an overall consideration of all class label probabilities, and PDBS uses it to guide the selection of attack paths. In addition, PDBS uses the beam search to find a successful attack path, thus avoiding suffering from limited search space. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that PDBS outperforms previous best models in a series of evaluation metrics, especially bringing up to a +19.5% attack success rate. Ablation studies and qualitative analyses further confirm the efficiency of PDBS.