MAT: Mixed-Strategy Game of Adversarial Training in Fine-tuning

MAT: Mixed-Strategy Game of Adversarial Training in Fine-tuning

Zhehua Zhong, Tianyi Chen, Zhen Wang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4674-4683. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/520

Fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained language models has been demonstrated effective for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Previous studies have established that incorporating adversarial training during the fine-tuning stage can significantly enhance model generalization and robustness. However, from the perspective of game theory, such utilizations of adversarial training correspond to pure-strategy games, which are inherently limited in terms of the scope of their strategies, thereby still having room for improvement. In order to push the performance boundaries, we propose a novel Mixed-strategy Adversarial Training algorithm (MAT). Methodologically, we derive the Nash equilibrium of a mixed-strategy game for adversarial training using Entropy Mirror Descent to establish MAT by sampling method. To verify the effectiveness of MAT, we conducted extensive benchmark experiments on large-scale pre-trained models, such as BERT and RoBERTa. MAT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both the GLUE and ANLI benchmarks in terms of generalization and robustness.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Adversarial machine learning
Natural Language Processing: NLP: Other