TextAttack: A Framework for Adversarial Attacks, Data Augmentation, and Adversarial Training in NLP
This provides a modular tool for NLP researchers to streamline adversarial analysis and training, though it is incremental as it consolidates existing methods rather than proposing new ones.
The paper tackles the challenge of fragmented implementations in NLP adversarial research by introducing TextAttack, a Python framework that unifies 16 existing attacks and supports models like BERT across GLUE tasks, enabling easier development and application to improve model performance.
While there has been substantial research using adversarial attacks to analyze NLP models, each attack is implemented in its own code repository. It remains challenging to develop NLP attacks and utilize them to improve model performance. This paper introduces TextAttack, a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and adversarial training in NLP. TextAttack builds attacks from four components: a goal function, a set of constraints, a transformation, and a search method. TextAttack's modular design enables researchers to easily construct attacks from combinations of novel and existing components. TextAttack provides implementations of 16 adversarial attacks from the literature and supports a variety of models and datasets, including BERT and other transformers, and all GLUE tasks. TextAttack also includes data augmentation and adversarial training modules for using components of adversarial attacks to improve model accuracy and robustness. TextAttack is democratizing NLP: anyone can try data augmentation and adversarial training on any model or dataset, with just a few lines of code. Code and tutorials are available at https://github.com/QData/TextAttack.