# Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples through An Improved Beam Search Algorithm

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08036 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08036/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01236/) (2016)
- [Practical Black-Box Attacks against Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02697/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07328/) (2017)
- [Threat of Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00553/) (2018)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07998/) (2018)
- [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)
- [PRADA: Protecting against DNN Model Stealing Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02628/) (2018)
- [Combating Adversarial Misspellings with Robust Word Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11268/) (2019)
- [Searching for a Search Method: Benchmarking Search Algorithms for Generating NLP Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06368/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Cyberbullying Classifiers are Sensitive to Model-Agnostic Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06384/) (2022)
- [Semantic-Preserving Prompt Hijacking: A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Auto-Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18756/) (2025)
- [A Highly Effective Low-Rank Compression of Deep Neural Networks with Modified Beam-Search and Modified Stable Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15179/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The research of adversarial attacks in the text domain attracts many interests in the last few years, and many methods with a high attack success rate have been proposed. However, these attack methods are inefficient as they require lots of queries for the victim model when crafting text adversarial examples. In this paper, a novel attack model is proposed, its attack success rate surpasses the benchmark attack methods, but more importantly, its attack efficiency is much higher than the benchmark attack methods. The novel method is empirically evaluated by attacking WordCNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, and BERT on four benchmark datasets. For instance, it achieves a 100% attack success rate higher than the state-of-the-art method when attacking BERT and BiLSTM on IMDB, but the number of queries for the victim models only is 1/4 and 1/6.5 of the state-of-the-art method, respectively. Also, further experiments show the novel method has a good transferability on the generated adversarial examples.