glitchlings 0.1.1

Monsters for your language games.

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                        Every language game breeds monsters.

Glitchlings are utilities for corrupting the text inputs to your language models in deterministic, linguistically principled ways.
Each embodies a different way that documents can be compromised in the wild.

If reinforcement learning environments are games, then Glitchlings are enemies to breathe new life into old challenges.

They do this by breaking surface patterns in the input while keeping the target output intact.

Some Glitchlings are petty nuisances. Some Glitchlings are eldritch horrors.
Together, they create truly nightmarish scenarios for your language models.

After all, what good is general intelligence if it can't handle a little chaos?

-The Curator

Quickstart

pip install -U glitchlings

from glitchlings import summon, SAMPLE_TEXT

gaggle = summon(["reduple", "mim1c", "typogre", "rushmore"])
gaggle(SAMPLE_TEXT)

Onҽ m‎ھ‎rning, wһen Gregor Samƽa woke from trouble𝐝 𝑑reams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin‎٠‎ He l lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightlh domed and divided by arches ino stiff sections. The bedding was adly able to cover it and and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legxs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the the rest of him, waved about helplessly ashe looked looked.

Motivation

If your model performs well on a particular task, but not when Glitchlings are present, it's a sign that it hasn't actually generalized to the problem.

Conversely, training a model to perform well in the presence of the types of perturbations introduced by Glitchlings should help it generalize better.

Your First Battle

Summon your chosen Glitchling (or a few, if ya nasty) and call it on your text or slot it into Dataset.map(...), supplying a seed if desired.
Some Glitchlings may have additional keyword arguments but they will always be optional with what I decide are "reasonable defaults".
Seed defaults to 151, obviously.

Calling a Glitchling on a str transparently calls .corrupt(str, ...) -> str.
This means that as long as your glitchlings get along logically, they play nicely with one another.

When summoned as a Gaggle, the Glitchlings will automatically order themselves into attack waves, based on the scope of the change they make:

1. Document
2. Paragraph
3. Sentence
4. Word
5. Character

They're horrible little gremlins, but they're not unreasonable.

Starter 'lings

For maintainability reasons, all Glitchling have consented to be given nicknames once they're in your care. See the Monster Manual for a complete bestiary.

Typogre

What a nice word, would be a shame if something happened to it.

Fatfinger. Typogre introduces character-level errors (duplicating, dropping, adding, or swapping) based on the layout of a (currently QWERTY) keyboard.

Args

• max_change_rate (float): The maximum number of edits to make as a percentage of the length (default: 0.02, 2%).
• preserve_first_last (bool): Avoid editing the first and last character of a word (default: False).
• keyboard (str): Keyboard layout key-neighbor map to use (default: "CURATOR_QWERTY").
• seed (int): The random seed for reproducibility (default: 151).

Mim1c

Wait, was that...?

Confusion. Mim1c replaces non-space characters with Unicode Confusables, characters that are distinct but would not usually confuse a human reader.

Args

• replacement_rate (float): The maximum proportion of characters to replace (default: 0.02, 2%).
• classes (list[str] | "all"): Restrict replacements to these Unicode script classes (default: ["LATIN", "GREEK", "CYRILLIC"]).
• seed (int): The random seed for reproducibility (default: 151).

Scannequin

How can a computer need reading glasses?

OCR Artifacts. Scannequin mimics optical character recognition errors by swapping visually similar character sequences (like rn↔m, cl↔d, O↔0, l/I/1).

Args

• error_rate (float): The maximum proportion of eligible confusion spans to replace (default: 0.02, 2%).
• seed (int): The random seed for reproducibility (default: 151).

Jargoyle

Uh oh. The worst person you know just bought a thesaurus.

Sesquipedalianism. Jargoyle, the insufferable Glitchling, replaces nouns with synonyms at random, without regard for connotational or denotational differences.

Args

• replacement_rate (float): The maximum proportion of words to replace (default: 0.1, 10%).
• part_of_speech: The WordNet part of speech to target (default: nouns). Accepts wn.NOUN, wn.VERB, wn.ADJ, or wn.ADV.
• seed (int): The random seed for reproducibility (default: 151).

Reduple

Did you say that or did I?

Broken Record. Reduple stutters through text by randomly reduplicating words. Like a nervous speaker, it creates natural repetitions that test a model's ability to handle redundancy without losing the thread.

Args

• reduplication_rate (float): The maximum proportion of words to reduplicate (default: 0.05, 5%).
• seed (int): The random seed for reproducibility (default: 151).

Rushmore

I accidentally an entire word.

Hasty Omission. The evil (?) twin of reduple, Rushmore moves with such frantic speed that it causes words to simply vanish from existence as it passes.

Args

• max_deletion_rate (float): The maximum proportion of words to delete (default: 0.01, 1%).
• seed (int): The random seed for reproducibility (default: 151).

Redactyl

Oops, that was my black highlighter.

FOIA Reply. Redactyl obscures random words in your document like an NSA analyst with a bad sense of humor.

Args

• replacement_char (str): The character to use for redaction (default: █).
• redaction_rate (float): The maximum proportion of words to redact (default: 0.05, 5%).
• merge_adjacent (bool): Whether to redact the space between adjacent redacted words (default: False).
• seed (int): The random seed for reproducibility (default: 151).

Field Report: Uncontained Specimens

Containment procedures pending

• ekkokin substitutes words with homophones (phonetic equivalents).
• nylingual backtranslates portions of text.
• glothopper introduces code-switching effects, blending languages or dialects.
• palimpsest rewrites, but leaves accidental traces of the past.
• vesuvius is an apocryphal Glitchling with ties to [Nosy, aren't we? -The Curator]

Apocrypha

Cave paintings and oral tradition contain many depictions of strange, otherworldly Glitchlings.
These Apocryphal Glitchling are said to possess unique abilities or behaviors.
If you encounter one of these elusive beings, please document your findings and share them with The Curator.

Reproducible Corruption

Every Glitchling owns its own independent random.Random instance. That means:

• No random.seed(...) calls touch Python's global RNG.
• Supplying a seed when you construct a Glitchling (or when you summon(...)) makes its behavior reproducible.
• Re-running a Gaggle with the same master seed and the same input text (and same external data!) yields identical corruption output.
• Corruption functions are written to accept an rng parameter internally so that all randomness is centralized and testable.

Caveats

• If you mutate a glitchling's parameters after you've used it (e.g. typogre.set_param(...)) the outputs may not be the same as before the change. So don't do that.

At Wits' End?

If you're trying to add a new glitchling and can't seem to make it deterministic, here are some places to look for determinism-breaking code:

1. Search for any direct calls to random.choice, random.shuffle, or set(...) ordering without going through the provided rng.
2. Ensure you sort collections before shuffling or sampling.
3. Make sure indices are chosen from a stable reference (e.g., original text) when applying length‑changing edits.
4. Make sure there are enough sort keys to maintain stability.