Machine Translation Models Stand Strong in the Face of Adversarial
  Attacks
Pavel Burnyshev Elizaveta Kostenok Alexey Zaytsev
Adversarial attacks expose vulnerabilities of deep learning models by
introducing minor perturbations to the input, which lead to substantial
alterations in the output. Our research focuses on the impact of such
adversarial attacks on sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, specifically
machine translation models. We introduce algorithms that incorporate basic text
perturbation heuristics and more advanced strategies, such as the
gradient-based attack, which utilizes a differentiable approximation of the
inherently non-differentiable translation metric. Through our investigation, we
provide evidence that machine translation models display robustness displayed
robustness against best performed known adversarial attacks, as the degree of
perturbation in the output is directly proportional to the perturbation in the
input. However, among underdogs, our attacks outperform alternatives, providing
the best relative performance. Another strong candidate is an attack based on
mixing of individual characters.