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Master's thesis

Master's Thesis: Robustness of Authorship Verification against Adversarial Obfuscation

Fraunhofer · Darmstadt, DE, 64295

Posted · Deadline: Deadline not specified — apply early

Project description

Background/Motivation: Authorship verification (AV) is used in areas such as forensics, plagiarism detection, and fake news detection to identify the true author of a text. The goal of authorship verification (AV) is to classify whether two or more texts were written by the same author (Y) or not (N). A major problem is that authors can intentionally obscure their writing style (adversarial obfuscation). Such attacks include, among other things, synonym replacements, paraphrasing, machine translations, or the use of language models for automatic rephrasing. These attacks often lead to AV systems making incorrect decisions, as superficial stylistic markers disappear. While current systems achieve high accuracy in controlled scenarios, there is a lack of systematic investigations into how robust they are against targeted obfuscations.Objective: The objective of this work is to investigate various attacks on style concealment and to develop an AV system that is as robust as possible against them. To achieve this, a systematic framework should be established that:Texts transformed with various obfuscation methods, measuring the impact of these attacks on common AV models, and designing a robust procedure (e.g., through adversarial training or contrastive learning) that better defends against these attacks.Results: The work aims to demonstrate how vulnerable existing AV approaches are to different obfuscation strategies and which approaches remain particularly robust. In addition, an adversarially trained model is presented that significantly improves robustness. The results contribute to the development of safe, practical AV systems and provide a foundation for future research on adversarial robustness in the field of stylometry. Be part of change Implementing and evaluating attacks for style obfuscation (paraphrasing, synonym replacement, translations, LLM rewriting). Researching and implementing robust AV methods (e.g., adversarial training, contrastive learning). Self-critical evaluation and comparison with baselines on benchmark datasets (e.g., PAN). Presenting the results and discussing the weaknesses of current methods.

Funding and compensation

Compensation not specified. See the original posting for amounts, duration and conditions.

Eligibility and application requirements

Review the qualifications, research interests and required documents in the description above. The employer or university's original posting is the source for complete eligibility requirements.

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