Recent studies have shown that deep neural networks are vulnerable to intentionally crafted adversarial examples, and various methods have been proposed to defend against adversarial word-substitution attacks for neural NLP models. However, there is
a lack of systematic study on comparing different defense approaches under the same attacking setting. In this paper, we seek to fill the gap of systematic studies through comprehensive researches on understanding the behavior of neural text classifiers trained by various defense methods under representative adversarial attacks. In addition, we propose an effective method to further improve the robustness of neural text classifiers against such attacks and achieved the highest accuracy on both clean and adversarial examples on AGNEWS and IMDB datasets by a significant margin.
Recently, few certified defense methods have been developed to provably guarantee the robustness of a text classifier to adversarial synonym substitutions. However, all existing certified defense methods assume that the defenders are informed of how
the adversaries generate synonyms, which is not a realistic scenario. In this paper, we propose a certifiably robust defense method by randomly masking a certain proportion of the words in an input text, in which the above unrealistic assumption is no longer necessary. The proposed method can defend against not only word substitution-based attacks, but also character-level perturbations. We can certify the classifications of over 50% texts to be robust to any perturbation of 5 words on AGNEWS, and 2 words on SST2 dataset. The experimental results show that our randomized smoothing method significantly outperforms recently proposed defense methods across multiple datasets.
