  A key component of modern conversational systems is the Dialogue State
Tracker (or DST), which models a user's goals and needs. Toward building more
robust and reliable DSTs, we introduce a prompt-based learning approach to
automatically generate effective adversarial examples to probe DST models. Two
key characteristics of this approach are: (i) it only needs the output of the
DST with no need for model parameters, and (ii) it can learn to generate
natural language utterances that can target any DST. Through experiments over
state-of-the-art DSTs, the proposed framework leads to the greatest reduction
in accuracy and the best attack success rate while maintaining good fluency and
a low perturbation ratio. We also show how much the generated adversarial
examples can bolster a DST through adversarial training. These results indicate
the strength of prompt-based attacks on DSTs and leave open avenues for
continued refinement.
