# Single Word Change is All You Need: Using LLMs to Create Synthetic Training Examples for Text Classifiers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17196 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17196/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2024.

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

- [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)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07125/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Weight Poisoning Attacks on Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06660/) (2020)
- [BAE: BERT-based Adversarial Examples for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01970/) (2020)
- [ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10369/) (2020)
- [Contextualized Perturbation for Textual Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07502/) (2020)
- [Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Models by Layerwise Weight Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13888/) (2021)
- [Towards Improving Adversarial Training of NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00544/) (2021)
- [BITE: Textual Backdoor Attacks with Iterative Trigger Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12700/) (2022)
- [Red Alarm for Pre-trained Models: Universal Vulnerability to Neuron-Level Backdoor Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06969/) (2021)
- [Natural Language Adversarial Defense through Synonym Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06723/) (2019)
- [Fake News Detection via NLP is Vulnerable to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09657/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Are Better Adversaries: Exploring Generative Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks Against Text Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18603/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In text classification, creating an adversarial example means subtly perturbing a few words in a sentence without changing its meaning, causing it to be misclassified by a classifier. A concerning observation is that a significant portion of adversarial examples generated by existing methods change only one word. This single-word perturbation vulnerability represents a significant weakness in classifiers, which malicious users can exploit to efficiently create a multitude of adversarial examples. This paper studies this problem and makes the following key contributions: (1) We introduce a novel metric ρ to quantitatively assess a classifier's robustness against single-word perturbation. (2) We present the SP-Attack, designed to exploit the single-word perturbation vulnerability, achieving a higher attack success rate, better preserving sentence meaning, while reducing computation costs compared to state-of-the-art adversarial methods. (3) We propose SP-Defense, which aims to improve rho by applying data augmentation in learning. Experimental results on 4 datasets and BERT and distilBERT classifiers show that SP-Defense improves ρ by 14.6% and 13.9% and decreases the attack success rate of SP-Attack by 30.4% and 21.2% on two classifiers respectively, and decreases the attack success rate of existing attack methods that involve multiple-word perturbations.