# Adversarial Robustness through Dynamic Ensemble Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16254 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16254/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Distillation as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04508/) (2015)
- [Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11932/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07328/) (2017)
- [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)
- [FreeLB: Enhanced Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11764/) (2019)
- [InfoBERT: Improving Robustness of Language Models from An Information Theoretic Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02329/) (2020)
- [Interpretable Adversarial Perturbation in Input Embedding Space for Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02917/) (2018)
- [Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12777/) (2021)
- [Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17004/) (2022)
- [Phrase-level Textual Adversarial Attack with Label Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10710/) (2022)
- [Randomized Smoothing with Masked Inference for Adversarially Robust Text Classifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06522/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Character-level Adversarial Attacks for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04346/) (2024)
- [Saliency Attention and Semantic Similarity-Driven Adversarial Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19413/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the reliability of pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT, BERT, RoBERTa, and T5. This paper presents Adversarial Robustness through Dynamic Ensemble Learning (ARDEL), a novel scheme designed to enhance the robustness of PLMs against such attacks. ARDEL leverages the diversity of multiple PLMs and dynamically adjusts the ensemble configuration based on input characteristics and detected adversarial patterns. Key components of ARDEL include a meta-model for dynamic weighting, an adversarial pattern detection module, and adversarial training with regularization techniques. Comprehensive evaluations using standardized datasets and various adversarial attack scenarios demonstrate that ARDEL significantly improves robustness compared to existing methods. By dynamically reconfiguring the ensemble to prioritize the most robust models for each input, ARDEL effectively reduces attack success rates and maintains higher accuracy under adversarial conditions. This work contributes to the broader goal of developing more secure and trustworthy AI systems for real-world NLP applications, offering a practical and scalable solution to enhance adversarial resilience in PLMs.
