用真实网页编辑记录测试阅读理解模型,发现主流模型在自然文本扰动下表现显著下降。
Pay Attention to Real World Perturbations! Natural Robustness Evaluation in Machine Reading Comprehension
- 基于维基百科编辑历史自动构建自然文本扰动数据集
- 预训练模型和大语言模型在自然扰动下准确率大幅下降
- 提示:适合关注模型实际应用鲁棒性的研究者
随着神经语言模型在机器阅读理解(MRC)任务上达到人类水平并广泛应用,其在真实场景中的鲁棒性日益重要。然而现有评估多依赖人工构造的合成扰动,难以反映真实情况。本文提出一种框架,通过替换MRC基准数据集中的段落为维基百科编辑历史中的对应版本,实现对自然文本扰动的自动化评估。该扰动源于真实编辑行为,不同于以往的人工生成方法。大规模实验覆盖SQUAD数据集及多种模型架构,发现预训练编码器模型在自然扰动下性能明显下降,更令人担忧的是,Flan-T5和大语言模型(LLMs)也继承了此类错误。进一步实验表明,这些发现可推广至更困难的MRC基准。为缓解此问题,训练时引入自然或合成扰动样本可提升鲁棒性,但仍显著落后于原始未扰动数据的表现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As neural language models achieve human-comparable performance on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) and see widespread adoption, ensuring their robustness in real-world scenarios has become increasingly important. Current robustness evaluation research, though, primarily develops synthetic perturbation methods, leaving unclear how well they reflect real life scenarios. Considering this, we present a framework to automatically examine MRC models on naturally occurring textual perturbations, by replacing paragraph in MRC benchmarks with their counterparts based on available Wikipedia edit history. Such perturbation type is natural as its design does not stem from an arteficial generative process, inherently distinct from the previously investigated synthetic approaches. In a large-scale study encompassing SQUAD datasets and various model architectures we observe that natural perturbations result in performance degradation in pre-trained encoder language models. More worryingly, these state-of-the-art Flan-T5 and Large Language Models (LLMs) inherit these errors. Further experiments demonstrate that our findings generalise to natural perturbations found in other more challenging MRC benchmarks. In an effort to mitigate these errors, we show that it is possible to improve the robustness to natural perturbations by training on naturally or synthetically perturbed examples, though a noticeable gap still remains compared to performance on unperturbed data.
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