# ReinforceBug: A Framework to Generate Adversarial Textual Examples

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08306/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11932/) (2019)
- [BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09984/) (2020)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07998/) (2018)
- [Wild Patterns: Ten Years After the Rise of Adversarial Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03141/) (2017)
- [TextBugger: Generating Adversarial Text Against Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05271/) (2018)
- [Black-box Generation of Adversarial Text Sequences to Evade Deep Learning Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04354/) (2018)
- [Generating Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11342/) (2017)
- [Counter-fitting Word Vectors to Linguistic Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00892/) (2016)
- [Text Classification Improved by Integrating Bidirectional LSTM with Two-dimensional Max Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06639/) (2016)
- [DANCin SEQ2SEQ: Fooling Text Classifiers with Adversarial Text Example Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05419/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Alert-ME: An Explainability-Driven Defense Against Adversarial Examples in Transformer-Based Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01225/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adversarial Examples (AEs) generated by perturbing original training examples are useful in improving the robustness of Deep Learning (DL) based models. Most prior works, generate AEs that are either unconscionable due to lexical errors or semantically or functionally deviant from original examples. In this paper, we present ReinforceBug, a reinforcement learning framework, that learns a policy that is transferable on unseen datasets and generates utility-preserving and transferable (on other models) AEs. Our results show that our method is on average 10% more successful as compared to the state-of-the-art attack TextFooler. Moreover, the target models have on average 73.64% confidence in the wrong prediction, the generated AEs preserve the functional equivalence and semantic similarity (83.38% ) to their original counterparts, and are transferable on other models with an average success rate of 46%.