NMT-Obfuscator Attack: Ignore a sentence in translation with only one word

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sadrizadeh, Sahar, Descalzo, César, Dolamic, Ljiljana, Frossard, Pascal
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Sadrizadeh, Sahar
Descalzo, César
Dolamic, Ljiljana
Frossard, Pascal
author_facet Sadrizadeh, Sahar
Descalzo, César
Dolamic, Ljiljana
Frossard, Pascal
contents Neural Machine Translation systems are used in diverse applications due to their impressive performance. However, recent studies have shown that these systems are vulnerable to carefully crafted small perturbations to their inputs, known as adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a new type of adversarial attack against NMT models. In this attack, we find a word to be added between two sentences such that the second sentence is ignored and not translated by the NMT model. The word added between the two sentences is such that the whole adversarial text is natural in the source language. This type of attack can be harmful in practical scenarios since the attacker can hide malicious information in the automatic translation made by the target NMT model. Our experiments show that different NMT models and translation tasks are vulnerable to this type of attack. Our attack can successfully force the NMT models to ignore the second part of the input in the translation for more than 50% of all cases while being able to maintain low perplexity for the whole input.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_12473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NMT-Obfuscator Attack: Ignore a sentence in translation with only one word
Sadrizadeh, Sahar
Descalzo, César
Dolamic, Ljiljana
Frossard, Pascal
Computation and Language
Neural Machine Translation systems are used in diverse applications due to their impressive performance. However, recent studies have shown that these systems are vulnerable to carefully crafted small perturbations to their inputs, known as adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a new type of adversarial attack against NMT models. In this attack, we find a word to be added between two sentences such that the second sentence is ignored and not translated by the NMT model. The word added between the two sentences is such that the whole adversarial text is natural in the source language. This type of attack can be harmful in practical scenarios since the attacker can hide malicious information in the automatic translation made by the target NMT model. Our experiments show that different NMT models and translation tasks are vulnerable to this type of attack. Our attack can successfully force the NMT models to ignore the second part of the input in the translation for more than 50% of all cases while being able to maintain low perplexity for the whole input.
title NMT-Obfuscator Attack: Ignore a sentence in translation with only one word
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12473