Abstract
The dominant approach in probing neural networks for linguistic properties is to train a new shallow multi-layer perceptron (MLP) on top of the model’s internal representations. This approach can detect properties encoded in the model, but at the cost of adding new parameters that may learn the task directly. We instead propose a subtractive pruning-based probe, where we find an existing subnetwork that performs the linguistic task of interest. Compared to an MLP, the subnetwork probe achieves both higher accuracy on pre-trained models and lower accuracy on random models, so it is both better at finding properties of interest and worse at learning on its own. Next, by varying the complexity of each probe, we show that subnetwork probing Pareto-dominates MLP probing in that it achieves higher accuracy given any budget of probe complexity. Finally, we analyze the resulting subnetworks across various tasks to locate where each task is encoded, and we find that lower-level tasks are captured in lower layers, reproducing similar findings in past work.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.naacl-main.74
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 960–966
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2021.naacl-main.74/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.74
- Cite (ACL):
- Steven Cao, Victor Sanh, and Alexander Rush. 2021. Low-Complexity Probing via Finding Subnetworks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 960–966, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Low-Complexity Probing via Finding Subnetworks (Cao et al., NAACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2021.naacl-main.74.pdf
- Code
- stevenxcao/subnetwork-probing + additional community code
- Data
- CoNLL 2003