Untargeted Code Authorship Evasion with Seq2Seq Transformation

Code authorship attribution is the problem of identifying authors of programming language codes through the stylistic features in their codes, a topic that recently witnessed significant interest with outstanding performance. In this work, we present SCAE, a code authorship obfuscation technique that leverages a Seq2Seq code transformer called StructCoder. SCAE customizes StructCoder, a system designed initially for function-level code translation from one language to another (e.g., Java to C#), using transfer learning. SCAE improved the efficiency at a slight accuracy degradation compared to existing work. We also reduced the processing time by about 68% while maintaining an 85% transformation success rate and up to 95.77% evasion success rate in the untargeted setting.

Robust Natural Language Processing: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Directions

Recent natural language processing (NLP) techniques have accomplished high performance on benchmark datasets, primarily due to the significant improvement in the performance of deep learning. The advances in the research community have led to great enhancements in state-of-the-art production systems for NLP tasks, such as virtual assistants, speech recognition, and sentiment analysis. However, such NLP systems still often fail when tested with adversarial attacks. The initial lack of robustness exposed troubling gaps in current models' language understanding capabilities, creating problems when NLP systems are deployed in real life. In this paper, we present a structured overview of NLP robustness research by summarizing the literature in a systemic way across various dimensions. We then take a deep-dive into the various dimensions of robustness, across techniques, metrics, embeddings, and benchmarks. Finally, we argue that robustness should be multi-dimensional, provide insights into current research, identify gaps in the literature to suggest directions worth pursuing to address these gaps.