Test-Time Self-Adaptive Small Language Models for Question Answering

Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sukmin Cho, Sung Hwang, Jong Park


Abstract
Recent instruction-finetuned large language models (LMs) have achieved notable performances in various tasks, such as question-answering (QA). However, despite their ability to memorize a vast amount of general knowledge across diverse tasks, they might be suboptimal on specific tasks due to their limited capacity to transfer and adapt knowledge to target tasks. Moreover, further finetuning LMs with labeled datasets is often infeasible due to their absence, but it is also questionable if we can transfer smaller LMs having limited knowledge only with unlabeled test data. In this work, we show and investigate the capabilities of smaller self-adaptive LMs, only with unlabeled test data. In particular, we first stochastically generate multiple answers, and then ensemble them while filtering out low-quality samples to mitigate noise from inaccurate labels. Our proposed self-adaption strategy demonstrates significant performance improvements on benchmark QA datasets with higher robustness across diverse prompts, enabling LMs to stay stable. Code is available at: https://github.com/starsuzi/T-SAS.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.1033
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15459–15469
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1033
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.1033
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sukmin Cho, Sung Hwang, and Jong Park. 2023. Test-Time Self-Adaptive Small Language Models for Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 15459–15469, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Test-Time Self-Adaptive Small Language Models for Question Answering (Jeong et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.1033.pdf