# MockingBERT: A Method for Retroactively Adding Resilience to NLP Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09915 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09915/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [CANINE: Pre-training an Efficient Tokenization-Free Encoder for Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06874/) (2021)
- [BPE-Dropout: Simple and Effective Subword Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13267/) (2019)
- [Combating Adversarial Misspellings with Robust Word Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11268/) (2019)
- [Charformer: Fast Character Transformers via Gradient-based Subword Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12672/) (2021)
- [Text Processing Like Humans Do: Visually Attacking and Shielding NLP Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11508/) (2019)
- [CharacterBERT: Reconciling ELMo and BERT for Word-Level Open-Vocabulary Representations From Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10392/) (2020)
- [CharBERT: Character-aware Pre-trained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01513/) (2020)
- [Robust Encodings: A Framework for Combating Adversarial Typos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01229/) (2020)
- [Visual Spoofing in content based spam detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05265/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Protecting NLP models against misspellings whether accidental or adversarial has been the object of research interest for the past few years. Existing remediations have typically either compromised accuracy or required full model re-training with each new class of attacks. We propose a novel method of retroactively adding resilience to misspellings to transformer-based NLP models. This robustness can be achieved without the need for re-training of the original NLP model and with only a minimal loss of language understanding performance on inputs without misspellings. Additionally we propose a new efficient approximate method of generating adversarial misspellings, which significantly reduces the cost needed to evaluate a model's resilience to adversarial attacks.