In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Inferential Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search

Huihan Li, Yuting Ning, Zeyi Liao, Siyuan Wang, Xiang Lorraine Li, Ximing Lu, Wenting Zhao, Faeze Brahman, Yejin Choi, Xiang Ren


Abstract
To effectively use large language models (LLMs) for real-world queries, it is imperative that they generalize to the long-tail distribution, i.e. rare examples where models exhibit low confidence. In this work, we take the first step towards evaluating LLMs in the long-tail distribution of inferential knowledge. We exemplify long-tail evaluation on the Natural Language Inference task. First, we introduce Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK), a systematic long-tail data generation framework, to obtain factually-correct yet long-tail inferential statements. LINK uses variable-wise prompting grounded on symbolic rules to seek low-confidence statements while ensuring factual correctness. We then use LINK to curate Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), a large-scale long-tail inferential knowledge dataset that contains 108K statements spanning four domains. We evaluate popular LLMs on LINT; we find that state-of-the-art LLMs show significant performance drop (21% relative drop for GPT4) on long-tail data as compared to on head distribution data, and smaller models show even more generalization weakness. These results further underscore the necessity of long-tail evaluation in developing generalizable LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.140
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2348–2370
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.140
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.140
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huihan Li, Yuting Ning, Zeyi Liao, Siyuan Wang, Xiang Lorraine Li, Ximing Lu, Wenting Zhao, Faeze Brahman, Yejin Choi, and Xiang Ren. 2024. In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Inferential Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2348–2370, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Inferential Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search (Li et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.140.pdf
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 2024.emnlp-main.140.data.zip