Abstract: Robustness verification that aims to formally certify the prediction behavior of neural networks has become an important tool for understanding model behavior and obtaining safety guarantees. However, previous methods can usually only handle neural networks with relatively simple architectures. In this paper, we consider the robustness verification problem for Transformers. Transformers have complex self-attention layers that pose many challenges for verification, including cross-nonlinearity and cross-position dependency, which have not been discussed in previous works. We resolve these challenges and develop the first robustness verification algorithm for Transformers. The certified robustness bounds computed by our method are significantly tighter than those by naive Interval Bound Propagation. These bounds also shed light on interpreting Transformers as they consistently reflect the importance of different words in sentiment analysis.

Similar Papers

Are Transformers universal approximators of sequence-to-sequence functions?
Chulhee Yun, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sashank Reddi, Sanjiv Kumar,
Towards Stable and Efficient Training of Verifiably Robust Neural Networks
Huan Zhang, Hongge Chen, Chaowei Xiao, Sven Gowal, Robert Stanforth, Bo Li, Duane Boning, Cho-Jui Hsieh,
Lite Transformer with Long-Short Range Attention
Zhanghao Wu, Zhijian Liu, Ji Lin, Yujun Lin, Song Han,