# On the Robustness of Text Vectorizers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07203 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07203/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [Parseval Networks: Improving Robustness to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08847/) (2017)
- [Towards Fast Computation of Certified Robustness for ReLU Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09699/) (2018)
- [An efficient framework for learning sentence representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02893/) (2018)
- [Formal Guarantees on the Robustness of a Classifier against Adversarial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08475/) (2017)
- [Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks: An Extreme Value Theory Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10578/) (2018)
- [A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12806/) (2021)
- [On the Properties of the Softmax Function with Application in Game Theory and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00805/) (2017)
- [What does LIME really see in images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06307/) (2021)
- [Convex Bounds on the Softmax Function with Applications to Robustness Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01713/) (2023)
- [Beyond Adult and COMPAS: Fairness in Multi-Class Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07801/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [How Smooth Is Attention?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14820/) (2023)
- [A framework for auditing grounding claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06205/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A fundamental issue in machine learning is the robustness of the model with respect to changes in the input. In natural language processing, models typically contain a first embedding layer, transforming a sequence of tokens into vector representations. While the robustness with respect to changes of continuous inputs is well-understood, the situation is less clear when considering discrete changes, for instance replacing a word by another in an input sentence. Our work formally proves that popular embedding schemes, such as concatenation, TF-IDF, and Paragraph Vector (a.k.a. doc2vec), exhibit robustness in the H"older or Lipschitz sense with respect to the Hamming distance. We provide quantitative bounds for these schemes and demonstrate how the constants involved are affected by the length of the document. These findings are exemplified through a series of numerical examples.