about
Are Prompt-Based Models Clueless? (arxiv.org)
30 points by PaulHoule on May 20, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | 7 comments on HN

In plain words: They tested few-shot models that fill in a blank, reusing the model's own word-prediction skill instead of training a new answer head, to see if they fall for surface shortcuts. They do: without those shortcuts, they score below or barely above random guessing.

Abstract · Are Prompt-based Models Clueless?

Finetuning large pre-trained language models with a task-specific head has advanced the state-of-the-art on many natural language understanding benchmarks. However, models with a task-specific head require a lot of training data, making them susceptible to learning and exploiting dataset-specific superficial cues that do not generalize to other datasets. Prompting has reduced the data requirement by reusing the language model head and formatting the task input to match the pre-training objective. Therefore, it is expected that few-shot prompt-based models do not exploit superficial cues. This paper presents an empirical examination of whether few-shot prompt-based models also exploit superficial cues. Analyzing few-shot prompt-based models on MNLI, SNLI, HANS, and COPA has revealed that prompt-based models also exploit superficial cues. While the models perform well on instances with superficial cues, they often underperform or only marginally outperform random accuracy on instances without superficial cues.

Pride Kavumba, Ryo Takahashi, Yusuke Oda
arXiv:2205.09295 · cs.CL · submitted May 19, 2022 · updated May 20, 2022
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN

Can someone TL;DR what superficial cues are in this paper?
It could be anything that's predictive or seems predictive of the outcome because of bias, accidents in the environment, etc. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

In this paper not somewhere else. Ok, more precisely

In the datasets used for text comprehension

I've worked with this kind of dataset and I'd say that the relationship between cues and real understanding is like that between spam and real emails in many people's inboxes.

To take the example of Clever Hans, cues are just ubiquitous everywhere and a system that learns to see them really well is going to conclude "Tyrone is a thug" because heuristics are easy and justice as hard.

It deeply problematizes the field of machine learning based text "understanding" because it is impossible to remove the cues just as Clever Hans problematizes work on animal intelligence. Looking for "understanding" in these models is a bit like G W Bush looking into Putin's eyes and getting a "sense of his soul".

> G W Bush looking into Putin's eyes and getting a "sense of his soul"

That wasn't a mistake. That was Bush being a lying politician.

A better example is when police guess whether a suspect is guilty.

gwern is the opposite of TL;DR