Vitaly Shalumov
2024
Measuring the Robustness of NLP Models to Domain Shifts
Nitay Calderon
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Naveh Porat
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Eyal Ben-David
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Alexander Chapanin
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Zorik Gekhman
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Nadav Oved
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Vitaly Shalumov
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Roi Reichart
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Existing research on Domain Robustness (DR) suffers from disparate setups, limited task variety, and scarce research on recent capabilities such as in-context learning. Furthermore, the common practice of measuring DR might not be fully accurate. Current research focuses on challenge sets and relies solely on the Source Drop (SD): Using the source in-domain performance as a reference point for degradation. However, we argue that the Target Drop (TD), which measures degradation from the target in-domain performance, should be used as a complementary point of view. To address these issues, we first curated a DR benchmark comprised of 7 diverse NLP tasks, which enabled us to measure both the SD and the TD. We then conducted a comprehensive large-scale DR study involving over 14,000 domain shifts across 21 fine-tuned models and few-shot LLMs. We found that both model types suffer from drops upon domain shifts. While fine-tuned models excel in-domain, few-shot LLMs often surpass them cross-domain, showing better robustness. In addition, we found that a large SD can often be explained by shifting to a harder domain rather than by a genuine DR challenge, and this highlights the importance of TD as a complementary metric. We hope our study will shed light on the current DR state of NLP models and promote improved evaluation practices toward more robust models.
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Co-authors
- Nitay Calderon 1
- Naveh Porat 1
- Eyal Ben-David 1
- Alexander Chapanin 1
- Zorik Gekhman 1
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