  Crafting adversarial examples has become an important technique to evaluate
the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, most existing works
focus on attacking the image classification problem since its input space is
continuous and output space is finite.
  In this paper, we study the much more challenging problem of crafting
adversarial examples for sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, whose inputs
are discrete text strings and outputs have an almost infinite number of
possibilities. To address the challenges caused by the discrete input space, we
propose a projected gradient method combined with group lasso and gradient
regularization. To handle the almost infinite output space, we design some
novel loss functions to conduct non-overlapping attack and targeted keyword
attack. We apply our algorithm to machine translation and text summarization
tasks, and verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm: by changing less
than 3 words, we can make seq2seq model to produce desired outputs with high
success rates. On the other hand, we recognize that, compared with the
well-evaluated CNN-based classifiers, seq2seq models are intrinsically more
robust to adversarial attacks.

Machine Learning