From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a
  Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework
Yangyi Chen Hongcheng Gao Ganqu Cui Lifan Yuan Dehan Kong Hanlu Wu Ning Shi Bo Yuan Longtao Huang Hui Xue Zhiyuan Liu Maosong Sun Heng Ji
Textual adversarial attacks can discover models' weaknesses by adding
semantic-preserved but misleading perturbations to the inputs. The long-lasting
adversarial attack-and-defense arms race in Natural Language Processing (NLP)
is algorithm-centric, providing valuable techniques for automatic robustness
evaluation. However, the existing practice of robustness evaluation may exhibit
issues of incomprehensive evaluation, impractical evaluation protocol, and
invalid adversarial samples. In this paper, we aim to set up a unified
automatic robustness evaluation framework, shifting towards model-centric
evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks. To address
the above challenges, we first determine robustness evaluation dimensions based
on model capabilities and specify the reasonable algorithm to generate
adversarial samples for each dimension. Then we establish the evaluation
protocol, including evaluation settings and metrics, under realistic demands.
Finally, we use the perturbation degree of adversarial samples to control the
sample validity. We implement a toolkit RobTest that realizes our automatic
robustness evaluation framework. In our experiments, we conduct a robustness
evaluation of RoBERTa models to demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation
framework, and further show the rationality of each component in the framework.
The code will be made public at \url{https://github.com/thunlp/RobTest}.