Mitigating Temporal Misalignment by Discarding Outdated Facts

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Michael J. Q., Choi, Eunsol
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909128311439360
author Zhang, Michael J. Q.
Choi, Eunsol
author_facet Zhang, Michael J. Q.
Choi, Eunsol
contents While large language models are able to retain vast amounts of world knowledge seen during pretraining, such knowledge is prone to going out of date and is nontrivial to update. Furthermore, these models are often used under temporal misalignment, tasked with answering questions about the present, despite having only been trained on data collected in the past. To mitigate the effects of temporal misalignment, we propose fact duration prediction: the task of predicting how long a given fact will remain true. In our experiments, we demonstrate that identifying which facts are prone to rapid change can help models avoid reciting outdated information and determine which predictions require seeking out up-to-date knowledge sources. We also show how modeling fact duration improves calibration for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-retrieval question answering, under temporal misalignment, by discarding volatile facts. Our data and code are released publicly at https://github.com/mikejqzhang/mitigating_misalignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_14824
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Temporal Misalignment by Discarding Outdated Facts
Zhang, Michael J. Q.
Choi, Eunsol
Computation and Language
While large language models are able to retain vast amounts of world knowledge seen during pretraining, such knowledge is prone to going out of date and is nontrivial to update. Furthermore, these models are often used under temporal misalignment, tasked with answering questions about the present, despite having only been trained on data collected in the past. To mitigate the effects of temporal misalignment, we propose fact duration prediction: the task of predicting how long a given fact will remain true. In our experiments, we demonstrate that identifying which facts are prone to rapid change can help models avoid reciting outdated information and determine which predictions require seeking out up-to-date knowledge sources. We also show how modeling fact duration improves calibration for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-retrieval question answering, under temporal misalignment, by discarding volatile facts. Our data and code are released publicly at https://github.com/mikejqzhang/mitigating_misalignment.
title Mitigating Temporal Misalignment by Discarding Outdated Facts
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14824