MathAttack: Attacking Large Language Models Towards Math Solving Ability
Zihao Zhou Qiufeng Wang Mingyu Jin Jie Yao Jianan Ye Wei Liu Wei Wang Xiaowei Huang Kaizhu Huang
With the boom of Large Language Models (LLMs), the research of solving Math
Word Problem (MWP) has recently made great progress. However, there are few
studies to examine the security of LLMs in math solving ability. Instead of
attacking prompts in the use of LLMs, we propose a MathAttack model to attack
MWP samples which are closer to the essence of security in solving math
problems. Compared to traditional text adversarial attack, it is essential to
preserve the mathematical logic of original MWPs during the attacking. To this
end, we propose logical entity recognition to identify logical entries which
are then frozen. Subsequently, the remaining text are attacked by adopting a
word-level attacker. Furthermore, we propose a new dataset RobustMath to
evaluate the robustness of LLMs in math solving ability. Extensive experiments
on our RobustMath and two another math benchmark datasets GSM8K and MultiAirth
show that MathAttack could effectively attack the math solving ability of LLMs.
In the experiments, we observe that (1) Our adversarial samples from
higher-accuracy LLMs are also effective for attacking LLMs with lower accuracy
(e.g., transfer from larger to smaller-size LLMs, or from few-shot to zero-shot
prompts); (2) Complex MWPs (such as more solving steps, longer text, more
numbers) are more vulnerable to attack; (3) We can improve the robustness of
LLMs by using our adversarial samples in few-shot prompts. Finally, we hope our
practice and observation can serve as an important attempt towards enhancing
the robustness of LLMs in math solving ability. We will release our code and
dataset.