arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

VerTox: Verifiable Reward-Guided Corpus Poisoning Against Neural Ranking Models

VerTox is a framework that turns corpus poisoning of neural ranking models into a verifiable reward‑guided reinforcement learning problem. By fine‑tuning compact large language models with reward shaping that couples ranking distortion and factual corruption, VerTox generates fluent, low‑perplexity adversarial documents that frequently outrank target items across multiple ranking architectures, including a commercial embedding model. Experiments show near‑perfect attack success and significant degradation of downstream retrieval‑augmented generation performance.

By Zhiqi Huang, Vivek Datla, Zhichao Xu, Puxuan Yu, Vivek Srikumar, Alfy Samuel
arXiv AI
Sep 10

CogniDir: Combating Cognitive Malicious Comments via Adaptive Distributional Learning for Robust Fake News Detection

CogniDir is an adaptive distributional learning framework designed to improve fake news detection against new psychologically grounded malicious comments generated by Large Language Models. It reframes robust detection as a dynamic data mixture optimization problem, using cognitive psychology to formalize adversarial paradigms and an information‑theoretic score to guide adaptive sampling of training data. Experiments on three benchmarks show that CogniDir achieves state‑of‑the‑art robustness, boosting F1 scores by up to 17.9% over existing baselines under heterogeneous AI‑generated attacks.

By Zhao Tong, Chunlin Gong, Yimeng Gu, Haichao Shi, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Xingcheng Xu, Xiao-Yu Zhang