Adversarial robustness of multi-source data fusion on data text classification supported by information technology

Multi-source heterogeneous text classification faces two major challenges: the difference in feature distribution across different data sources leads to alignment difficulties, and the model is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, resulting in misclassifications. To address this, this paper proposes a multi-source fusion method that integrates hierarchical adaptive BERT with multi-source voting adversarial training. Lightweight adapters are inserted into each Transformer layer of BERT, achieving hierarchical feature projection through learnable affine transformations—lower-level adapters align lexical commonalities, while higher-level adapters capture semantic specificities, and a gating mechanism dynamically fuses multi-source representations. Furthermore, a gradient-symmetric cross-source perturbation generator is constructed, retaining only perturbations that enable at least two source models to predict divergence, generating transferable adversarial examples. During training, a multi-source classifier committee and hard voting mechanism are employed: when at least 50% of the sub-models detect anomalies, adversarial loss is triggered, forcing the model to learn cross-source robust features. Simultaneously, the fusion weights are dynamically adjusted based on the confidence of each source, and feature dimensionality reduction is performed on low-confidence sources to suppress noise. Experiments show that this method performs well in feature alignment (mean cosine similarity 0.842, HSIC 0.615, low standard deviation) and adversarial robustness (accuracy 87.8%, F1 85.4%). After introducing multi-source voting, the false negative rate (FNR) is 0.12–0.18 and the false positive rate (FPR) is 0.05–0.08 under five types of attacks: FGSM, PGD, TextBugger, DeepWordBug, and TextFooler, demonstrating good cross-source adversarial detection capabilities.

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Publication Details

Journal
Egyptian Informatics Journal
Published
2026-04-16
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eij.2026.100963
Primary Topic
Topic Modeling
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Adversarial robustness of multi-source data fusion on data text classification supported by information technology

Pengming Wang, Ze Gao, Mengyao Guo, Linhan Niu
Egyptian Informatics Journal
Topic Modeling
article

Adversarial robustness of multi-source data fusion on data text classification supported by information technology

Pengming Wang, Ze Gao, Mengyao Guo, Linhan Niu
article en

Abstract

Multi-source heterogeneous text classification faces two major challenges: the difference in feature distribution across different data sources leads to alignment difficulties, and the model is vulnerable to adversarial attacks, resulting in misclassifications. To address this, this paper proposes a multi-source fusion method that integrates hierarchical adaptive BERT with multi-source voting adversarial training. Lightweight adapters are inserted into each Transformer layer of BERT, achieving hierarchical feature projection through learnable affine transformations—lower-level adapters align lexical commonalities, while higher-level adapters capture semantic specificities, and a gating mechanism dynamically fuses multi-source representations. Furthermore, a gradient-symmetric cross-source perturbation generator is constructed, retaining only perturbations that enable at least two source models to predict divergence, generating transferable adversarial examples. During training, a multi-source classifier committee and hard voting mechanism are employed: when at least 50% of the sub-models detect anomalies, adversarial loss is triggered, forcing the model to learn cross-source robust features. Simultaneously, the fusion weights are dynamically adjusted based on the confidence of each source, and feature dimensionality reduction is performed on low-confidence sources to suppress noise. Experiments show that this method performs well in feature alignment (mean cosine similarity 0.842, HSIC 0.615, low standard deviation) and adversarial robustness (accuracy 87.8%, F1 85.4%). After introducing multi-source voting, the false negative rate (FNR) is 0.12–0.18 and the false positive rate (FPR) is 0.05–0.08 under five types of attacks: FGSM, PGD, TextBugger, DeepWordBug, and TextFooler, demonstrating good cross-source adversarial detection capabilities.

Egyptian Informatics JournalVol. 34
Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK), Wenzhou University (CN), Harbin Institute of Technology (CN), Dawat University (AF), Wenzhou University of Technology, New York University (US)
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Openalex Percentile: Top 11%
Topic Modeling
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