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Poster
in
Workshop: Pitfalls of limited data and computation for Trustworthy ML

Robustifying Language Models with Test-Time Adaptation

Noah McDermott · Junfeng Yang · Chengzhi Mao


Abstract:

Large-scale language models achieved state-of-the-art performance over a number of language tasks. However, they fail on adversarial language examples, which are sentences optimized to fool the language models but with similar semantic meanings for humans. While prior work focuses on making the language model robust at training time, retraining for robustness is often unrealistic for large-scale foundation models. Instead, we propose to make the language models robust at test time. By dynamically adapting the input sentence with predictions from masked words, we show that we can reverse many language adversarial attacks. Since our approach does not require any training, it works for novel tasks at test time and can adapt to novel adversarial corruptions. Visualizations and empirical results on two popular sentence classification dataset, demonstrate that our method can repair adversarial language attacks over 65% of the time.

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