Cross-functional Analysis of Generalization in Behavioral Learning

Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo, Benjamin Roth


Abstract
In behavioral testing, system functionalities underrepresented in the standard evaluation setting (with a held-out test set) are validated through controlled input-output pairs. Optimizing performance on the behavioral tests during training (behavioral learning) would improve coverage of phenomena not sufficiently represented in the i.i.d. data and could lead to seemingly more robust models. However, there is the risk that the model narrowly captures spurious correlations from the behavioral test suite, leading to overestimation and misrepresentation of model performance—one of the original pitfalls of traditional evaluation. In this work, we introduce BeLUGA, an analysis method for evaluating behavioral learning considering generalization across dimensions of different granularity levels. We optimize behavior-specific loss functions and evaluate models on several partitions of the behavioral test suite controlled to leave out specific phenomena. An aggregate score measures generalization to unseen functionalities (or overfitting). We use BeLUGA to examine three representative NLP tasks (sentiment analysis, paraphrase identification, and reading comprehension) and compare the impact of a diverse set of regularization and domain generalization methods on generalization performance.1
Anthology ID:
2023.tacl-1.60
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11
Month:
Year:
2023
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
1066–1081
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.60
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00590
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo and Benjamin Roth. 2023. Cross-functional Analysis of Generalization in Behavioral Learning. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11:1066–1081.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-functional Analysis of Generalization in Behavioral Learning (Luz de Araujo & Roth, TACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.60.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.60.mp4