Are Prompt-based Models Clueless?

Pride Kavumba, Ryo Takahashi, Yusuke Oda


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.166
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2333–2352
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.166
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.166
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pride Kavumba, Ryo Takahashi, and Yusuke Oda. 2022. Are Prompt-based Models Clueless?. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2333–2352, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Are Prompt-based Models Clueless? (Kavumba et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2022.acl-long.166.pdf
Data
GLUEMultiNLISNLISuperGLUE