arXiv:2512.23307cs.CRcs.IR2025-12被引 1

用随机掩码提升排序模型抗干扰能力,保障搜索安全

RobustMask: Certified Robustness against Adversarial Neural Ranking Attack via Randomized Masking

  • 通过随机掩码平滑输入,增强模型对字符/词/短语扰动的鲁棒性
  • 可认证超过20%的前10候选文档在30%内容被扰动时仍保持正确排序
  • 适合关注检索系统安全的开发者和研究人员

神经排序模型在检索增强生成等场景中广泛应用,但易受对抗性扰动影响:细微的字符、词或短语级修改可扭曲检索结果,人为抬升目标项,破坏搜索引擎和下游系统的完整性。现有防御方法或依赖启发式规则泛化能力差,或依赖强假设下的认证方法,实用性受限。本文提出RobustMask,结合预训练语言模型的上下文预测能力与随机掩码平滑机制,有效抵御字符、词、短语层面的对抗攻击。利用排序模型的成对比较能力和概率统计分析,我们理论上证明了RobustMask的认证型top-K鲁棒性。大量实验表明,该方法可在高达30%内容被扰动的情况下,为前10名中的超过20%候选文档提供认证保护。结果表明,RobustMask显著提升了神经排序模型的对抗鲁棒性,为现实检索系统提供了更强的安全保障。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Neural ranking models have achieved remarkable progress and are now widely deployed in real-world applications such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, like other neural architectures, they remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulations: subtle character-, word-, or phrase-level perturbations can poison retrieval results and artificially promote targeted candidates, undermining the integrity of search engines and downstream systems. Existing defenses either rely on heuristics with poor generalization or on certified methods that assume overly strong adversarial knowledge, limiting their practical use. To address these challenges, we propose RobustMask, a novel defense that combines the context-prediction capability of pretrained language models with a randomized masking-based smoothing mechanism. Our approach strengthens neural ranking models against adversarial perturbations at the character, word, and phrase levels. Leveraging both the pairwise comparison ability of ranking models and probabilistic statistical analysis, we provide a theoretical proof of RobustMask's certified top-K robustness. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that RobustMask successfully certifies over 20% of candidate documents within the top-10 ranking positions against adversarial perturbations affecting up to 30% of their content. These results highlight the effectiveness of RobustMask in enhancing the adversarial robustness of neural ranking models, marking a significant step toward providing stronger security guarantees for real-world retrieval systems.

对抗攻击排序模型认证鲁棒性检索安全

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