Mitigating Data Poisoning in Text Classification with Differential Privacy
Chang Xu, Jun Wang, Francisco Guzmán, Benjamin Rubinstein, Trevor Cohn
Abstract
NLP models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. One type of attack can plant a backdoor in a model by injecting poisoned examples in training, causing the victim model to misclassify test instances which include a specific pattern. Although defences exist to counter these attacks, they are specific to an attack type or pattern. In this paper, we propose a generic defence mechanism by making the training process robust to poisoning attacks through gradient shaping methods, based on differentially private training. We show that our method is highly effective in mitigating, or even eliminating, poisoning attacks on text classification, with only a small cost in predictive accuracy.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{xu-etal-2021-mitigating-data,
title = "Mitigating Data Poisoning in Text Classification with Differential Privacy",
author = "Xu, Chang and
Wang, Jun and
Guzm{\'a}n, Francisco and
Rubinstein, Benjamin and
Cohn, Trevor",
editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine and
Huang, Xuanjing and
Specia, Lucia and
Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021",
month = nov,
year = "2021",
address = "Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.369/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.369",
pages = "4348--4356"
}