Natural language processing (NLP) tasks, ranging from text classification to text generation, have been revolutionised by the pretrained language models, such as BERT. This allows corporations to easily build powerful APIs by encapsulating fine-tuned
BERT models for downstream tasks. However, when a fine-tuned BERT model is deployed as a service, it may suffer from different attacks launched by the malicious users. In this work, we first present how an adversary can steal a BERT-based API service (the victim/target model) on multiple benchmark datasets with limited prior knowledge and queries. We further show that the extracted model can lead to highly transferable adversarial attacks against the victim model. Our studies indicate that the potential vulnerabilities of BERT-based API services still hold, even when there is an architectural mismatch between the victim model and the attack model. Finally, we investigate two defence strategies to protect the victim model, and find that unless the performance of the victim model is sacrificed, both model extraction and adversarial transferability can effectively compromise the target models.
Children are the most damaged group affected by crimes of terrorism, suffering numerous forms of aggression. Due to the terrorism which has violently disrupted Syria previously, the phenomenon of recruiting children into combat and related actions mo
tivated the law to release the Legal Decree n. /11/ for the year 2013 which criminalizes the recruitment and employment of children in combat.
The publication of this law has developed a new contradictory situation where it has made the recruited child both a victim and a criminal at the same time.
Therefore, the child is considered a victim in the recruitment and deployment of combat which aims to polytheism them in the fighting actions, while at the same time the child is also considered as being responsible for the crimes that he
ventured to do during his recruitment period. This presents an unacceptable contrast within the law.
The subject of this study is to identify the children which have been recruited by the armed terrorist groups, and to show the features displayed which distinguish such children from other children who are involved in criminal activity with the
aim of defining the legal position for these recruited children and their responsibility towards the crimes that they have committed during their recruitment period.
