Prompt Makes mask Language Models Better Adversarial Attackers

Generating high-quality synonymous perturbations is a core challenge for textual adversarial tasks. However, candidates generated from the masked language model often contain many words that are antonyms or irrelevant to the original words, which limit the perturbation space and affect the attack’s effectiveness. We present ProAttacker1 which uses Prompt to make the mask language models better adversarial Attackers. ProAttacker inverts the prompt paradigm by leveraging the prompt with the class label to guide the language model to generate more semantically-consistent perturbations. We present a systematic evaluation to analyze the attack performance on 6 NLP datasets, covering text classification and inference. Our experiments demonstrate that ProAttacker outperforms state-of-the-art attack strategies in both success rate and perturb rate.