Think Twice: Measuring the Efficiency of Eliminating Prediction Shortcuts of Question Answering Models

Lukáš Mikula, Michal Štefánik, Marek Petrovič, Petr Sojka


Abstract
While the Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate a majority of language understanding tasks, previous work shows that some of these results are supported by modelling spurious correlations of training datasets. Authors commonly assess model robustness by evaluating their models on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets of the same task, but these datasets might share the bias of the training dataset. We propose a simple method for measuring a scale of models’ reliance on any identified spurious feature and assess the robustness towards a large set of known and newly found prediction biases for various pre-trained models and debiasing methods in Question Answering (QA). We find that the reported OOD gains of debiasing methods can not be explained by mitigated reliance on biased features, suggesting that biases are shared among different QA datasets. We further evidence this by measuring that performance of OOD models depends on bias features comparably to the ID model. Our findings motivate future work to refine the reports of LLMs’ robustness to a level of known spurious features.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.133
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2179–2193
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.133
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lukáš Mikula, Michal Štefánik, Marek Petrovič, and Petr Sojka. 2024. Think Twice: Measuring the Efficiency of Eliminating Prediction Shortcuts of Question Answering Models. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2179–2193, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Think Twice: Measuring the Efficiency of Eliminating Prediction Shortcuts of Question Answering Models (Mikula et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.133.pdf
Software:
 2024.eacl-long.133.software.zip