Large Language Model (LLM) has demonstrated significant ability in various Natural Language Processing tasks. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the phrasing of the task prompt, leading to research on automatic prompt optimization using labeled task data. We reveal that these prompt optimization techniques are vulnerable to distribution shifts such as subpopulation shifts, which are common for LLMs in real-world scenarios such as customer reviews analysis. In this light, we propose a new problem of robust prompt optimization for LLMs against distribution shifts, which requires the prompt optimized over the labeled source group can simultaneously generalize to an unlabeled target group. To solve this problem, we propose Generalized Prompt Optimization framework , which incorporates the unlabeled data from the target group into prompt optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework with significant performance improvement on the target group and comparable performance on the source group.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models easily learn spurious correlations from complex contexts such as tabular data. Counterfactual training—using the factual and counterfactual data by augmentation—has become a promising solution. However, it is costly to construct faithful counterfactual examples because it is tricky to maintain the consistency and dependency of the tabular data. In this paper, we take a more efficient fashion to ask hypothetical questions like “in which year would the net profit be larger if the revenue in 2019 were $38,298?”, whose effects on the answers are equivalent to those expensive counterfactual tables. We propose a hypothetical training framework that uses paired examples with different hypothetical questions to supervise the direction of model gradient towards the counterfactual answer change. The superior generalization results on tabular MRC datasets, including a newly constructed stress test and MultiHiertt, validate our effectiveness.

Neural discrete reasoning (NDR) has shown remarkable progress in combining deep models with discrete reasoning. However, we find that existing NDR solution suffers from large performance drop on hypothetical questions, e.g. “what the annualized rate of return would be if the revenue in 2020 was doubled”. The key to hypothetical question answering (HQA) is counterfactual thinking, which is a natural ability of human reasoning but difficult for deep models. In this work, we devise a Learning to Imagine (L2I) module, which can be seamlessly incorporated into NDR models to perform the imagination of unseen counterfactual. In particular, we formulate counterfactual thinking into two steps: 1) identifying the fact to intervene, and 2) deriving the counterfactual from the fact and assumption, which are designed as neural networks. Based on TAT-QA, we construct a very challenging HQA dataset with 8,283 hypothetical questions. We apply the proposed L2I to TAGOP, the state-of-the-art solution on TAT-QA, validating the rationality and effectiveness of our approach.