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Main Authors: Sun, Yudao, Yin, Juan, Zhao, Juan, Zhang, Fan, Liu, Yongheng, Chen, Hongji
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16550
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author Sun, Yudao
Yin, Juan
Zhao, Juan
Zhang, Fan
Liu, Yongheng
Chen, Hongji
author_facet Sun, Yudao
Yin, Juan
Zhao, Juan
Zhang, Fan
Liu, Yongheng
Chen, Hongji
contents Neural network language models (LMs) are confronted with significant challenges in generalization and robustness. Currently, many studies focus on improving either generalization or robustness in isolation, without methods addressing both aspects simultaneously, which presents a significant challenge in developing LMs that are both robust and generalized. In this paper, we propose a bi-stage optimization framework to uniformly enhance both the generalization and robustness of LMs, termed UEGR. Specifically, during the forward propagation stage, we enrich the output probability distributions of adversarial samples by adaptive dropout to generate diverse sub models, and incorporate JS divergence and adversarial losses of these output distributions to reinforce output stability. During backward propagation stage, we compute parameter saliency scores and selectively update only the most critical parameters to minimize unnecessary deviations and consolidate the model's resilience. Theoretical analysis shows that our framework includes gradient regularization to limit the model's sensitivity to input perturbations and selective parameter updates to flatten the loss landscape, thus improving both generalization and robustness. The experimental results show that our method significantly improves the generalization and robustness of LMs compared to other existing methods across 13 publicly available language datasets, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16550
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unified Enhancement of the Generalization and Robustness of Language Models via Bi-Stage Optimization
Sun, Yudao
Yin, Juan
Zhao, Juan
Zhang, Fan
Liu, Yongheng
Chen, Hongji
Computation and Language
Neural network language models (LMs) are confronted with significant challenges in generalization and robustness. Currently, many studies focus on improving either generalization or robustness in isolation, without methods addressing both aspects simultaneously, which presents a significant challenge in developing LMs that are both robust and generalized. In this paper, we propose a bi-stage optimization framework to uniformly enhance both the generalization and robustness of LMs, termed UEGR. Specifically, during the forward propagation stage, we enrich the output probability distributions of adversarial samples by adaptive dropout to generate diverse sub models, and incorporate JS divergence and adversarial losses of these output distributions to reinforce output stability. During backward propagation stage, we compute parameter saliency scores and selectively update only the most critical parameters to minimize unnecessary deviations and consolidate the model's resilience. Theoretical analysis shows that our framework includes gradient regularization to limit the model's sensitivity to input perturbations and selective parameter updates to flatten the loss landscape, thus improving both generalization and robustness. The experimental results show that our method significantly improves the generalization and robustness of LMs compared to other existing methods across 13 publicly available language datasets, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
title Unified Enhancement of the Generalization and Robustness of Language Models via Bi-Stage Optimization
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16550