Papers with word substitution

8 papers
Towards Improving Adversarial Training of NLP Models (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent methods for generating NLP adversarial examples involve combinatorial search and expensive sentence encoders for constraining the generated instances.
Approach: They propose to use vanilla adversarial training to train NLP models using a word substitution attack optimized for vanilla adversary training.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves model performance and standard accuracy and can defend against other types of word substitution attacks.
Random Smooth-based Certified Defense against Text Adversarial Attack (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Textual adversarial examples train models on the worst-case text generated by substituting words in original texts with synonyms, but due to the discrete word embedding representations, the large search space hinders the robust training efficiency.
Approach: They propose to treat the word substitution as a continuous perturbation on the word embedding representation and apply random smooth techniques to approximate the word replacement operation.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms conventional methods and improves the robustness in training.
Certified Robustness to Word Substitution Attack with Differential Privacy (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples can be easily fooled by DNNs, making the robustness and security of NLP models significantly important.
Approach: They propose a differential privacy-based algorithm to achieve certified robustness against word substitution at- tacks in text classification via differential privacy.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves higher accuracy and more than 30X efficiency improvement over existing defense algorithms.
CodeMixBench: Evaluating Code-Mixing Capabilities of LLMs Across 18 Languages (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are limited by their narrow language pairs and tasks, failing to adequately assess their code-mixing abilities.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess large language models' (LLMs) code-mixing abilities that covers eight tasks and 18 languages from seven language families.
Outcome: The proposed method combines word substitution with GPT-4 prompting to generate large-scale synthetic code-mixed texts.
SAFER: A Structure-free Approach for Certified Robustness to Adversarial Word Substitutions (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: State-of-the-art NLP models can be fooled by human-unaware transformations such as synonymous word substitution.
Approach: They propose a method that constructs a stochastic ensemble by applying random word substitutions on the input sentences and leverages the statistical properties to provably certify the robustness.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on IMDB and Amazon text classification tasks with practically meaningful certified accuracy.
Modeling Adversarial Attack on Pre-trained Language Models as Sequential Decision Making (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown strong potential in various downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose to model adversarial attack task as a sequential decision-making problem where the whole attack process is sequential with two decision- making problems, i.e., word finder and word substitution.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves the highest attack success rate with a comparable modification rate and semantic similarity to attack fine-tuned BERT.
Learning to Substitute Words with Model-based Score Ranking (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms both masked language models and large language models.
Approach: They propose a model-based scoring approach to quantify sentence quality . they propose 'loss function' that optimizes alignment between model predictions and sentence scores .
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms masked language models and large language models in the quantitative analysis of word substitutions.
Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in text generation tasks, but their utilization carries inherent risks, including plagiarism and the dissemination of fake news.
Approach: They propose to use a dataset to construct an AI-generated student essay that employs a range of text perturbation methods to evade detection.
Outcome: The proposed methods evade detection and maintain quality of the generated essays while avoiding plagiarism and fake news.

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