In this paper, we propose an optimization-based adversarial attack against Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. First, we propose an optimization problem to generate adversarial examples that are semantically similar to the original sentences but destroy the translation generated by the target NMT model. This optimization problem is discrete, and we propose a continuous relaxation to solve it. With this relaxation, we find a probability distribution for each token in the adversarial example, and then we can generate multiple adversarial examples by sampling from these distributions. Experimental results show that our attack significantly degrades the translation quality of multiple NMT models while maintaining the semantic similarity between the original and adversarial sentences. Furthermore, our attack outperforms the baselines in terms of success rate, similarity preservation, effect on translation quality, and token error rate. Finally, we propose a black-box extension of our attack by sampling from an optimized probability distribution for a reference model whose gradients are accessible.

本文提出了一种基于优化的对抗攻击方式来攻击神经机器翻译模型，并在实验中取得了成功的效果，同时提出了针对黑盒攻击的扩展方法。

一种针对神经机器翻译模型的对抗攻击松弛优化方法