2025.findings-acl.717@ACL

Total: 1

#1 The Silent Saboteur: Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks against Black-Box Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Hongru Song, Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Jianming Lv, Maarten de Rijke, Xueqi Cheng

We explore adversarial attacks against retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems to identify their vulnerabilities. We focus on generating human-imperceptible adversarial examples and introduce a novel imperceptible retrieve-to-generate attack against RAG. This task aims to find imperceptible perturbations that retrieve a target document, originally excluded from the initial top-k candidate set, in order to influence the final answer generation. To address this task, we propose ReGENT, a reinforcement learning-based framework that tracks interactions between the attacker and the target RAG and continuously refines attack strategies based on relevance-generation-naturalness rewards. Experiments on newly constructed factual and non-factual question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that ReGENT significantly outperforms existing attack methods in misleading RAG systems with small imperceptible text perturbations.

Subject: ACL.2025 - Findings