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Main Authors: Elazar, Yanai, Paranjape, Bhargavi, Peng, Hao, Wiegreffe, Sarah, Raghavi, Khyathi, Srikumar, Vivek, Singh, Sameer, Smith, Noah A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09605
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author Elazar, Yanai
Paranjape, Bhargavi
Peng, Hao
Wiegreffe, Sarah
Raghavi, Khyathi
Srikumar, Vivek
Singh, Sameer
Smith, Noah A.
author_facet Elazar, Yanai
Paranjape, Bhargavi
Peng, Hao
Wiegreffe, Sarah
Raghavi, Khyathi
Srikumar, Vivek
Singh, Sameer
Smith, Noah A.
contents The inevitable appearance of spurious correlations in training datasets hurts the generalization of NLP models on unseen data. Previous work has found that datasets with paired inputs are prone to correlations between a specific part of the input (e.g., the hypothesis in NLI) and the label; consequently, models trained only on those outperform chance. Are these correlations picked up by models trained on the full input data? To address this question, we propose a new evaluation method, Counterfactual Attentiveness Test (CAT). CAT uses counterfactuals by replacing part of the input with its counterpart from a different example (subject to some restrictions), expecting an attentive model to change its prediction. Using CAT, we systematically investigate established supervised and in-context learning models on ten datasets spanning four tasks: natural language inference, reading comprehension, paraphrase detection, and visual & language reasoning. CAT reveals that reliance on such correlations is mainly data-dependent. Surprisingly, we find that GPT3 becomes less attentive with an increased number of demonstrations, while its accuracy on the test data improves. Our results demonstrate that augmenting training or demonstration data with counterfactuals is effective in improving models' attentiveness. We show that models' attentiveness measured by CAT reveals different conclusions from solely measuring correlations in data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_09605
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring and Improving Attentiveness to Partial Inputs with Counterfactuals
Elazar, Yanai
Paranjape, Bhargavi
Peng, Hao
Wiegreffe, Sarah
Raghavi, Khyathi
Srikumar, Vivek
Singh, Sameer
Smith, Noah A.
Computation and Language
The inevitable appearance of spurious correlations in training datasets hurts the generalization of NLP models on unseen data. Previous work has found that datasets with paired inputs are prone to correlations between a specific part of the input (e.g., the hypothesis in NLI) and the label; consequently, models trained only on those outperform chance. Are these correlations picked up by models trained on the full input data? To address this question, we propose a new evaluation method, Counterfactual Attentiveness Test (CAT). CAT uses counterfactuals by replacing part of the input with its counterpart from a different example (subject to some restrictions), expecting an attentive model to change its prediction. Using CAT, we systematically investigate established supervised and in-context learning models on ten datasets spanning four tasks: natural language inference, reading comprehension, paraphrase detection, and visual & language reasoning. CAT reveals that reliance on such correlations is mainly data-dependent. Surprisingly, we find that GPT3 becomes less attentive with an increased number of demonstrations, while its accuracy on the test data improves. Our results demonstrate that augmenting training or demonstration data with counterfactuals is effective in improving models' attentiveness. We show that models' attentiveness measured by CAT reveals different conclusions from solely measuring correlations in data.
title Measuring and Improving Attentiveness to Partial Inputs with Counterfactuals
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09605