Injecting Bias into Text Classification Models using Backdoor Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yavuz, A. Dilara, Gursoy, M. Emre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yavuz, A. Dilara
Gursoy, M. Emre
author_facet Yavuz, A. Dilara
Gursoy, M. Emre
contents The rapid growth of natural language processing (NLP) and pre-trained language models have enabled accurate text classification in a variety of settings. However, text classification models are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where an attacker embeds a trigger into the victim model to make the model predict attacker-desired labels in targeted scenarios. In this paper, we propose to utilize backdoor attacks for a new purpose: bias injection. We develop a backdoor attack in which a subset of the training dataset is poisoned to associate strong male actors with negative sentiment. We execute our attack on two popular text classification datasets (IMDb and SST) and seven different models ranging from traditional Doc2Vec-based models to LSTM networks and modern transformer-based BERT and RoBERTa models. Our results show that the reduction in backdoored models' benign classification accuracy is limited, implying that our attacks remain stealthy, whereas the models successfully learn to associate strong male actors with negative sentiment (100% attack success rate with >= 3% poison rate). Attacks on BERT and RoBERTa are particularly more stealthy and effective, demonstrating an increased risk of using modern and larger models. We also measure the generalizability of our bias injection by proposing two metrics: (i) U-BBSR which uses previously unseen words when measuring attack success, and (ii) P-BBSR which measures attack success using paraphrased test samples. U-BBSR and P-BBSR results show that the bias injected by our attack can go beyond memorizing a trigger phrase.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_18975
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Injecting Bias into Text Classification Models using Backdoor Attacks
Yavuz, A. Dilara
Gursoy, M. Emre
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
The rapid growth of natural language processing (NLP) and pre-trained language models have enabled accurate text classification in a variety of settings. However, text classification models are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where an attacker embeds a trigger into the victim model to make the model predict attacker-desired labels in targeted scenarios. In this paper, we propose to utilize backdoor attacks for a new purpose: bias injection. We develop a backdoor attack in which a subset of the training dataset is poisoned to associate strong male actors with negative sentiment. We execute our attack on two popular text classification datasets (IMDb and SST) and seven different models ranging from traditional Doc2Vec-based models to LSTM networks and modern transformer-based BERT and RoBERTa models. Our results show that the reduction in backdoored models' benign classification accuracy is limited, implying that our attacks remain stealthy, whereas the models successfully learn to associate strong male actors with negative sentiment (100% attack success rate with >= 3% poison rate). Attacks on BERT and RoBERTa are particularly more stealthy and effective, demonstrating an increased risk of using modern and larger models. We also measure the generalizability of our bias injection by proposing two metrics: (i) U-BBSR which uses previously unseen words when measuring attack success, and (ii) P-BBSR which measures attack success using paraphrased test samples. U-BBSR and P-BBSR results show that the bias injected by our attack can go beyond memorizing a trigger phrase.
title Injecting Bias into Text Classification Models using Backdoor Attacks
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18975