Word-level Textual Adversarial Attacking as Combinatorial Optimization

Understand

Adversarial attacks are carried out to reveal the vulnerability of deep neural networks.

• Textual adversarial attacking is challenging because text is discrete and a small perturbation can bring significant change to the original input.
• Word-level attacking, which can be regarded as a combinatorial optimization problem, is a well-studied class of textual attack methods.
• However, existing word-level attack models are far from perfect, largely because unsuitable search space reduction methods and inefficient optimization algorithms are employed.