Yumeng Wang, PhD student at L3S, was awarded “AI Talent 2022” by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Economics at the TechTide Digital Conference on September 13, 2022. The award is given every year to graduates with excellent theses on AI topics at universities in Lower Saxony. This year, three AI talents were nominated, of which Yumeng Wang, received the award for her master’s thesis “Global Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing Ranking Models”. Ms. Wang was nominated by Prof. Dr. Avishek Anand and Prof. Dr. tech. Wolfgang Nejdl, who supervised the thesis at L3S at Leibniz Universität Hannover.
The master thesis was a study on the robustness of ranking models under adversarial attacks due to document interference. The results of the study highlight potential biases in the dataset and ranking model and raise awareness of the risk of applying large pre-trained models to ranking tasks. The master’s thesis will be followed up in an article at the International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) 2022 with the topic “BERT Rankers are Brittle: a Study using Adversarial Document Perturbations”.
Congratulations to Yumeng Wang for this great achievement!
