A Data-Free Substitute Model Training Method for Textual Adversarial Attacks

BERT and other pre-trained language models are vulnerable to textual adversarial attacks. While current transfer-based textual adversarial attacks in black-box environments rely on real datasets to train substitute models, obtaining the datasets can be challenging for attackers. To address this issue, we propose a data-free substitute training method (DaST-T) for textual adversarial attacks, which can train substitute models without the assistance of real data. DaST-T consists of two major steps. Firstly, DaST-T creates a special Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to train substitute models without any real data. The training procedure utilizes samples synthesized at random by the generative model, where labels are generated by the attacked model. In particular, DaST-T designs a data augmenter for the generative model to facilitate rapid exploration of the entire sample space, thereby accelerating the performance of substitute model training. Secondly, DaST-T applies existing white-box textual adversarial attack methods to the substitute model to generate adversarial text, which is then migrated to the attacked model. DaST-T can effectively address the issue of limited access to real datasets in black-box textual adversarial attacks. Experimental results on text classification tasks in NLP show that DaST-T can achieve superior attack performance compared to other baselines of black-box textual adversarial attacks while requiring fewer sample queries.