Anchor Points: Benchmarking Models with Much Fewer Examples

Rajan Vivek, Kawin Ethayarajh, Diyi Yang, Douwe Kiela


Abstract
Modern language models often exhibit powerful but brittle behavior, leading to the development of larger and more diverse benchmarks to reliably assess their behavior. Here, we suggest that model performance can be benchmarked and elucidated with much smaller evaluation sets. We first show that in six popular language classification benchmarks, model confidence in the correct class on many pairs of points is strongly correlated across models. We build upon this phenomenon to propose Anchor Point Selection, a technique to select small subsets of datasets that capture model behavior across the entire dataset. Anchor points reliably rank models: across 87 diverse language model-prompt pairs, evaluating models using 1-30 anchor points outperforms uniform sampling and other baselines at accurately ranking models. Moreover, just a dozen anchor points can be used to estimate model per-class predictions on all other points in a dataset with low error, sufficient for gauging where the model is likely to fail. Lastly, we present Anchor Point Maps for visualizing these insights and facilitating comparisons of the performance of different models on various regions within the dataset distribution.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.95
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:
1576–1601
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.95
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rajan Vivek, Kawin Ethayarajh, Diyi Yang, and Douwe Kiela. 2024. Anchor Points: Benchmarking Models with Much Fewer Examples. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1576–1601, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Anchor Points: Benchmarking Models with Much Fewer Examples (Vivek et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.95.pdf
Software:
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Note:
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