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An Empirical Study on Model-agnostic Debiasing Strategies for Robust Natural Language Inference

Paper · 2020 · Tianyu Liu, Xin Zheng, Xiaoan Ding et al.

Summary

NLI models tend to exploit shortcuts in their training data, such as hypothesis-only cues, word overlap and length mismatch. Earlier fixes usually targeted one such shortcut and could make models worse on other adversarial sets or on new domains. The authors ask whether a debiasing strategy that does not depend on the architecture can make models robust to several attacks while keeping their ability to generalize.

They first benchmark ten models, from InferSent, DAM and ESIM to BERT, XLNet and RoBERTa, on ten adversarial test sets grouped into four families (partial-input, inter-sentence, logical inference, stress tests) and on general-purpose sets (RTE, Diag, SICK, SciTail). They then compare several techniques:

  • mixture-of-experts (MoE) debiasing with bias-specific experts,
  • data augmentation by text swap, word substitution and paraphrase,
  • merging heterogeneous training corpora,
  • model ensembling.

No single method helps on every attack. Model-level ensembling, swap augmentation and dataset merging with performance-based reweighting each counter several biases at once. This gives practitioners concrete guidance on how to combine debiasing methods.

Key points

  • The adversarial suite is released on GitHub (tyliupku/nli-debiasing-datasets) and includes:
    • PI-CD and PI-SP (hypothesis-only cues),
    • IS-SD (HANS) and IS-CS (inter-sentence heuristics),
    • LI-LI and LI-TS (logical inference),
    • ST-WO, ST-NE, ST-LM and ST-SE (Naik et al. stress tests).
  • To estimate how related the test sets are, the authors computed Pearson correlations of accuracy across 30 runs (10 models × 3 seeds). IS-SD correlates more strongly with IS-CS and LI-TS than with the stress tests.
  • MoE debiasing used three separate bias experts (word overlap, length mismatch, partial input).
    • A debiaser tied to a single bias was not enough for overall robustness.
    • Model-level ensembling beat the other MoE combination schemes.
  • Swapping premise and hypothesis helped on the stress tests and the lexical inference test. Paraphrasing hypotheses helped against syntactic and partial-input shortcuts.
  • The authors merged SNLI, MNLI, DNLI and ANLI, about 1.35M training pairs in total.
    • Human-in-the-loop data (ANLI) contributed more than automatically built DNLI.
    • Performance-based reweighting raised ANLI accuracy from 49.2 to 51.2 without losing accuracy on DNLI, SNLI or MNLI.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When you cannot measure how related two test sets are directly, use the accuracies of many model runs on each set and correlate them as a proxy for shared difficulty.
  • I2. Logical constraints can yield free test items: if A entails B, then B must not contradict A, so swapping the sentence pair produces automatically labeled checks.
  • I3. Treat each known shortcut (overlap, length, hypothesis-only) as its own deliberately shallow expert, and use what it gets right to discount or flag those training items.
  • I4. Build hard test subsets by keeping only items that a cheap partial-input classifier gets wrong.
  • I5. When combining training corpora of uneven quality, weight sources by how much they actually improve held-out performance, and merge their dev sets into one selection set.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Correlating per-suite scores across many parser and reader runs would reveal which evaluation suites measure the same weakness, so we could drop redundant suites and add ones that measure something new.
  • I2 (answer): The readers could be checked for consistency by asking reversed questions on fables and school tests and flagging answers that violate such logic, without any new annotation.
  • I3 (learn): Shallow heuristic baselines could serve as negative controls; evaluation items they already solve show little about real understanding and could be reported separately from the hard remainder.
  • I4 (answer): Running a trivial question-only guesser over QA and word-problem sets would isolate the items that truly require building the world of the text.
  • I5 (learn): Silver data agreed by witness parsers and LLM teacher tiers could be weighted by measured downstream benefit rather than mixed uniformly.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Cite

Cite as Tianyu Liu, Xin Zheng, Xiaoan Ding, Baobao Chang and Zhifang Sui. 2020. An Empirical Study on Model-agnostic Debiasing Strategies for Robust Natural Language Inference. Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.48

@inproceedings{liu2020empirical,
  title = {{An Empirical Study on Model-agnostic Debiasing Strategies for Robust Natural Language Inference}},
  author = {Tianyu Liu, Xin Zheng, Xiaoan Ding, Baobao Chang and Zhifang Sui},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.48},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.48}
}

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