# READ: Improving Relation Extraction from an ADversarial Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02931 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02931/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09602/) (2018)
- [BAE: BERT-based Adversarial Examples for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01970/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Example Generation with Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06059/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Training Methods for Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07725/) (2016)
- [Matching the Blanks: Distributional Similarity for Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03158/) (2019)
- [FreeLB: Enhanced Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11764/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Relation Extraction using LSTMs on Sequences and Tree Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00770/) (2016)
- [Simple BERT Models for Relation Extraction and Semantic Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05255/) (2019)
- [Robust Neural Machine Translation with Doubly Adversarial Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02443/) (2019)
- [Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03743/) (2017)
- [FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07124/) (2019)
- [Towards Improving Adversarial Training of NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00544/) (2021)
- [Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01923/) (2020)
- [Re-TACRED: Addressing Shortcomings of the TACRED Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08398/) (2021)
- [ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15022/) (2020)
- [Can LLMs Learn from Previous Mistakes? Investigating LLMs' Errors to Boost for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20046/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent works in relation extraction (RE) have achieved promising benchmark accuracy; however, our adversarial attack experiments show that these works excessively rely on entities, making their generalization capability questionable. To address this issue, we propose an adversarial training method specifically designed for RE. Our approach introduces both sequence- and token-level perturbations to the sample and uses a separate perturbation vocabulary to improve the search for entity and context perturbations. Furthermore, we introduce a probabilistic strategy for leaving clean tokens in the context during adversarial training. This strategy enables a larger attack budget for entities and coaxes the model to leverage relational patterns embedded in the context. Extensive experiments show that compared to various adversarial training methods, our method significantly improves both the accuracy and robustness of the model. Additionally, experiments on different data availability settings highlight the effectiveness of our method in low-resource scenarios. We also perform in-depth analyses of our proposed method and provide further hints. We will release our code at https://github.com/David-Li0406/READ.