Bag of Lies: Robustness in Continuous Pre-training BERT

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Gevers, Ine, Daelemans, Walter
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Gevers, Ine
Daelemans, Walter
author_facet Gevers, Ine
Daelemans, Walter
contents This study aims to acquire more insights into the continuous pre-training phase of BERT regarding entity knowledge, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Since the pandemic emerged after the last update of BERT's pre-training data, the model has little to no entity knowledge about COVID-19. Using continuous pre-training, we control what entity knowledge is available to the model. We compare the baseline BERT model with the further pre-trained variants on the fact-checking benchmark Check-COVID. To test the robustness of continuous pre-training, we experiment with several adversarial methods to manipulate the input data, such as training on misinformation and shuffling the word order until the input becomes nonsensical. Surprisingly, our findings reveal that these methods do not degrade, and sometimes even improve, the model's downstream performance. This suggests that continuous pre-training of BERT is robust against misinformation. Furthermore, we are releasing a new dataset, consisting of original texts from academic publications in the LitCovid repository and their AI-generated false counterparts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09967
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bag of Lies: Robustness in Continuous Pre-training BERT
Gevers, Ine
Daelemans, Walter
Computation and Language
This study aims to acquire more insights into the continuous pre-training phase of BERT regarding entity knowledge, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Since the pandemic emerged after the last update of BERT's pre-training data, the model has little to no entity knowledge about COVID-19. Using continuous pre-training, we control what entity knowledge is available to the model. We compare the baseline BERT model with the further pre-trained variants on the fact-checking benchmark Check-COVID. To test the robustness of continuous pre-training, we experiment with several adversarial methods to manipulate the input data, such as training on misinformation and shuffling the word order until the input becomes nonsensical. Surprisingly, our findings reveal that these methods do not degrade, and sometimes even improve, the model's downstream performance. This suggests that continuous pre-training of BERT is robust against misinformation. Furthermore, we are releasing a new dataset, consisting of original texts from academic publications in the LitCovid repository and their AI-generated false counterparts.
title Bag of Lies: Robustness in Continuous Pre-training BERT
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09967