A synthetic data approach for domain generalization of NLI models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hosseini, Mohammad Javad, Petrov, Andrey, Fabrikant, Alex, Louis, Annie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Hosseini, Mohammad Javad
Petrov, Andrey
Fabrikant, Alex
Louis, Annie
author_facet Hosseini, Mohammad Javad
Petrov, Andrey
Fabrikant, Alex
Louis, Annie
contents Natural Language Inference (NLI) remains an important benchmark task for LLMs. NLI datasets are a springboard for transfer learning to other semantic tasks, and NLI models are standard tools for identifying the faithfulness of model-generated text. There are several large scale NLI datasets today, and models have improved greatly by hill-climbing on these collections. Yet their realistic performance on out-of-distribution/domain data is less well-understood. We explore the opportunity for synthetic high-quality datasets to adapt NLI models for zero-shot use in downstream applications across new and unseen text domains. We demonstrate a new approach for generating NLI data in diverse domains and lengths, so far not covered by existing training sets. The resulting examples have meaningful premises, the hypotheses are formed in creative ways rather than simple edits to a few premise tokens, and the labels have high accuracy. We show that models trained on this data ($685$K synthetic examples) have the best generalization to completely new downstream test settings. On the TRUE benchmark, a T5-small model trained with our data improves around $7\%$ on average compared to training on the best alternative dataset. The improvements are more pronounced for smaller models, while still meaningful on a T5 XXL model. We also demonstrate gains on test sets when in-domain training data is augmented with our domain-general synthetic data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12368
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A synthetic data approach for domain generalization of NLI models
Hosseini, Mohammad Javad
Petrov, Andrey
Fabrikant, Alex
Louis, Annie
Computation and Language
Natural Language Inference (NLI) remains an important benchmark task for LLMs. NLI datasets are a springboard for transfer learning to other semantic tasks, and NLI models are standard tools for identifying the faithfulness of model-generated text. There are several large scale NLI datasets today, and models have improved greatly by hill-climbing on these collections. Yet their realistic performance on out-of-distribution/domain data is less well-understood. We explore the opportunity for synthetic high-quality datasets to adapt NLI models for zero-shot use in downstream applications across new and unseen text domains. We demonstrate a new approach for generating NLI data in diverse domains and lengths, so far not covered by existing training sets. The resulting examples have meaningful premises, the hypotheses are formed in creative ways rather than simple edits to a few premise tokens, and the labels have high accuracy. We show that models trained on this data ($685$K synthetic examples) have the best generalization to completely new downstream test settings. On the TRUE benchmark, a T5-small model trained with our data improves around $7\%$ on average compared to training on the best alternative dataset. The improvements are more pronounced for smaller models, while still meaningful on a T5 XXL model. We also demonstrate gains on test sets when in-domain training data is augmented with our domain-general synthetic data.
title A synthetic data approach for domain generalization of NLI models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12368