Evidence > Intuition: Transferability Estimation for Encoder Selection

Elisa Bassignana, Max Müller-Eberstein, Mike Zhang, Barbara Plank


Abstract
With the increase in availability of large pre-trained language models (LMs) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), it becomes critical to assess their fit for a specific target task a priori—as fine-tuning the entire space of available LMs is computationally prohibitive and unsustainable. However, encoder transferability estimation has received little to no attention in NLP. In this paper, we propose to generate quantitative evidence to predict which LM, out of a pool of models, will perform best on a target task without having to fine-tune all candidates. We provide a comprehensive study on LM ranking for 10 NLP tasks spanning the two fundamental problem types of classification and structured prediction. We adopt the state-of-the-art Logarithm of Maximum Evidence (LogME) measure from Computer Vision (CV) and find that it positively correlates with final LM performance in 94% of the setups. In the first study of its kind, we further compare transferability measures with the de facto standard of human practitioner ranking, finding that evidence from quantitative metrics is more robust than pure intuition and can help identify unexpected LM candidates.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.283
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4218–4227
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.283
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.283
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elisa Bassignana, Max Müller-Eberstein, Mike Zhang, and Barbara Plank. 2022. Evidence > Intuition: Transferability Estimation for Encoder Selection. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4218–4227, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evidence > Intuition: Transferability Estimation for Encoder Selection (Bassignana et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.283.pdf