mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Are Synonym Substitution Attacks Really Synonym Substitution Attacks?

arXiv 2210.02844 ↗First posted 6 Oct 2022cs.CLcited by 4

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we explore the following question: Are synonym substitution attacks really synonym substitution attacks (SSAs)? We approach this question by examining how SSAs replace words in the original sentence and show that there are still unresolved obstacles that make current SSAs generate invalid adversarial samples. We reveal that four widely used word substitution methods generate a large fraction of invalid substitution words that are ungrammatical or do not preserve the original sentence's semantics. Next, we show that the semantic and grammatical constraints used in SSAs for detecting invalid word replacements are highly insufficient in detecting invalid adversarial samples.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2022.

Builds on

22 of 40 references.

References · 22

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
  3. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  4. 2019DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lightercited by 4,243
  5. 2015Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classificationcited by 2,293
  6. 2017SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluationcited by 998
  7. 2020Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckListcited by 979
  8. 2019Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailmentcited by 663
  9. 2020BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERTcited by 488
  10. 2018Universal Sentence Encodercited by 485
  11. 2018Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examplescited by 422
  12. 2018Black-box Generation of Adversarial Text Sequences to Evade Deep Learning Classifierscited by 341
10 more
  1. 2020BAE: BERT-based Adversarial Examples for Text Classificationcited by 316
  2. 2016Counter-fitting Word Vectors to Linguistic Constraintscited by 138
  3. 2020Contextualized Perturbation for Textual Adversarial Attackcited by 136
  4. 2022DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddingscited by 131
  5. 2020Reevaluating Adversarial Examples in Natural Languagecited by 83
  6. 2021Towards Improving Adversarial Training of NLP Modelscited by 79
  7. 2020It's Morphin' Time! Combating Linguistic Discrimination with Inflectional Perturbationscited by 64
  8. 2022Detection of Word Adversarial Examples in Text Classification: Benchmark and Baseline via Robust Density Estimationcited by 32
  9. 2021A Strong Baseline for Query Efficient Attacks in a Black Box Settingcited by 16
  10. 2021BERT is Robust! A Case Against Synonym-Based Adversarial Examples in Text Classificationcited by 9

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.

4 papers.

  1. 2023Generating Valid and Natural Adversarial Examples with Large Language Modelscited by 12
  2. 2024Train & Constrain: Phonologically Informed Tongue-Twister Generation from Topics and Paraphrasescited by 3
  3. 2025Adversarial Text Generation with Dynamic Contextual Perturbationcited by 2
  4. 2026Precise Verification of Transformers through ReLU-Catalyzed Abstraction Refinementcited by 0