Code for our EMNLP2020 long paper:

BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERT

• Python 3.7
• PyTorch 1.4.0
• transformers 2.9.0
• TextFooler

To train a classification model, please use the run_glue.py script in the huggingface transformers==2.9.0.

To generate adversarial samples based on the masked-LM, run

python bertattack.py --data_path data_defense/imdb_1k.tsv --mlm_path bert-base-uncased --tgt_path models/imdbclassifier --use_sim_mat 1 --output_dir data_defense/imdb_logs.tsv --num_label 2 --use_bpe 1 --k 48 --start 0 --end 1000 --threshold_pred_score 0

• --data_path: We take IMDB dataset as an example. Datasets can be obtained in TextFooler.
• --mlm_path: We use BERT-base-uncased model as our target masked-LM.
• --tgt_path: We follow the official fine-tuning process in transformers to fine-tune BERT as the target model.
• --k 48: The threshold k is the number of possible candidates
• --output_dir : The output file.
• --start: --end: in case the dataset is large, we provide a script for multi-thread process.
• --threshold_pred_score: a score in cutting off predictions that may not be suitable (details in Section5.1)

The datasets are re-formatted to the GLUE style.

Some configs are fixed, you can manually change them.

If you need to use similar-words-filter, you need to download and process consine similarity matrix following TextFooler. We only use the filter in sentiment classification tasks like IMDB and YELP.

If you need to evaluate the USE-results, you need to create the corresponding tensorflow environment USE.

For faster generation, you could turn off the BPE substitution.

As illustrated in the paper, we set thresholds to balance between the attack success rate and USE similarity score.

The multi-thread process use the batchrun.py script

You can run

cat cmd.txt | python batchrun.py --gpus 0,1,2,3 

to simutaneously generate adversarial samples of the given dataset for faster generation. We use the IMDB dataset as an example.