What Will My Model Forget? Forecasting Forgotten Examples in Language Model Refinement

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jin, Xisen, Ren, Xiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Jin, Xisen
Ren, Xiang
author_facet Jin, Xisen
Ren, Xiang
contents Language models deployed in the wild make errors. However, simply updating the model with the corrected error instances causes catastrophic forgetting -- the updated model makes errors on instances learned during the instruction tuning or upstream training phase. Randomly replaying upstream data yields unsatisfactory performance and often comes with high variance and poor controllability. To this end, we try to forecast upstream examples that will be forgotten due to a model update for improved controllability of the replay process and interpretability. We train forecasting models given a collection of online learned examples and corresponding forgotten upstream pre-training examples. We propose a partially interpretable forecasting model based on the observation that changes in pre-softmax logit scores of pretraining examples resemble that of online learned examples, which performs decently on BART but fails on T5 models. We further show a black-box classifier based on inner products of example representations achieves better forecasting performance over a series of setups. Finally, we show that we reduce forgetting of upstream pretraining examples by replaying examples that are forecasted to be forgotten, demonstrating the practical utility of forecasting example forgetting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_01865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Will My Model Forget? Forecasting Forgotten Examples in Language Model Refinement
Jin, Xisen
Ren, Xiang
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Language models deployed in the wild make errors. However, simply updating the model with the corrected error instances causes catastrophic forgetting -- the updated model makes errors on instances learned during the instruction tuning or upstream training phase. Randomly replaying upstream data yields unsatisfactory performance and often comes with high variance and poor controllability. To this end, we try to forecast upstream examples that will be forgotten due to a model update for improved controllability of the replay process and interpretability. We train forecasting models given a collection of online learned examples and corresponding forgotten upstream pre-training examples. We propose a partially interpretable forecasting model based on the observation that changes in pre-softmax logit scores of pretraining examples resemble that of online learned examples, which performs decently on BART but fails on T5 models. We further show a black-box classifier based on inner products of example representations achieves better forecasting performance over a series of setups. Finally, we show that we reduce forgetting of upstream pretraining examples by replaying examples that are forecasted to be forgotten, demonstrating the practical utility of forecasting example forgetting.
title What Will My Model Forget? Forecasting Forgotten Examples in Language Model Refinement
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01865