Related papers: BERT Rankers are Brittle: a Study using Adversaria…

Although BERT is widely used by the NLP community, little is known about its inner workings. Several attempts have been made to shed light on certain aspects of BERT, often with contradicting conclusions. A much raised concern focuses on…

Recently, with the advancement of deep learning, several applications in text classification have advanced significantly. However, this improvement comes with a cost because deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial examples. This weakness…

As machine learning systems become more widely used, especially for safety critical applications, there is a growing need to ensure that these systems behave as intended, even in the face of adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are…

This work considers a black-box threat model in which adversaries attempt to propagate arbitrary non-relevant content in search. We show that retrievers, rerankers, and LLM relevance judges are all highly vulnerable to attacks that enable…

The landscape of adversarial attacks against text classifiers continues to grow, with new attacks developed every year and many of them available in standard toolkits, such as TextAttack and OpenAttack. In response, there is a growing body…

Societal biases resonate in the retrieved contents of information retrieval (IR) systems, resulting in reinforcing existing stereotypes. Approaching this issue requires established measures of fairness in respect to the representation of…

Neural retrieval models have acquired significant effectiveness gains over the last few years compared to term-based methods. Nevertheless, those models may be brittle when faced to typos, distribution shifts or vulnerable to malicious…

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into information retrieval systems introduces new attack surfaces, particularly for adversarial ranking manipulations. We present $\textbf{StealthRank}$, a novel adversarial attack method that…

In recent years, large pre-trained transformers have led to substantial gains in performance over traditional retrieval models and feedback approaches. However, these results are primarily based on the MS Marco/TREC Deep Learning Track…

Current neural re-rankers often struggle with complex information needs and long, content-rich documents. The fundamental issue is not computational--it is intelligent content selection: identifying what matters in lengthy, multi-faceted…

Learning-to-Rank (LTR) is a supervised machine learning approach that constructs models specifically designed to order a set of items or documents based on their relevance or importance to a given query or context. Despite significant…

The growing adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has led to a rise in adversarial attacks. Existing defenses, relying on semantic analysis or voting, face a trade-off between high computational cost and limited robustness under…

We explore adversarial attacks against retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems to identify their vulnerabilities. We focus on generating human-imperceptible adversarial examples and introduce a novel imperceptible retrieve-to-generate…

Traditional information retrieval (IR) ranking models process the full text of documents. Newer models based on Transformers, however, would incur a high computational cost when processing long texts, so typically use only snippets from the…

Machine learning and deep learning in particular has advanced tremendously on perceptual tasks in recent years. However, it remains vulnerable against adversarial perturbations of the input that have been crafted specifically to fool the…

We study the use of BERT for non-factoid question-answering, focusing on the passage re-ranking task under varying passage lengths. To this end, we explore the fine-tuning of BERT in different learning-to-rank setups, comprising both…

The success of pre-trained word embeddings has motivated its use in tasks in the biomedical domain. The BERT language model has shown remarkable results on standard performance metrics in tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and…

Robustness of huge Transformer-based models for natural language processing is an important issue due to their capabilities and wide adoption. One way to understand and improve robustness of these models is an exploration of an adversarial…

Multiple neural language models have been developed recently, e.g., BERT and XLNet, and achieved impressive results in various NLP tasks including sentence classification, question answering and document ranking. In this paper, we explore…

Owing to the phenomenal success of BERT on various NLP tasks and benchmark datasets, industry practitioners are actively experimenting with fine-tuning BERT to build NLP applications for solving industry use cases. For most datasets that…