Aaron Chan


2023

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Are Machine Rationales (Not) Useful to Humans? Measuring and Improving Human Utility of Free-text Rationales
Brihi Joshi | Ziyi Liu | Sahana Ramnath | Aaron Chan | Zhewei Tong | Shaoliang Nie | Qifan Wang | Yejin Choi | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Among the remarkable emergent capabilities of large language models (LMs) is free-text rationalization; beyond certain scale, large LMs are capable of generating seemingly useful rationalizations, which in turn, can dramatically enhance their performances on leaderboards. This phenomenon raises a question: can machine generated rationales also be useful for humans, especially when lay humans try to answer questions based on those machine rationales? We observe that human utility of existing rationales is far from satisfactory and expensive to estimate with human studies. Existing metrics like task performance of the LM generating the rationales or similarity between generated and gold rationales are not good indicators of their human utility. While we observe that certain properties of rationales like conciseness and novelty are correlated with their human utility, estimating them without human involvement is challenging. We show that, by estimating a rationale’s helpfulness in answering similar unseen instances, we can measure its human utility to a better extent. We also translate this finding into an automated score, Gen-U, that we propose, which can help improve LMs’ ability to generate rationales with better human utility, while maintaining most of its task performance. Lastly, we release all code and collected data with this project.

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XMD: An End-to-End Framework for Interactive Explanation-Based Debugging of NLP Models
Dong-Ho Lee | Akshen Kadakia | Brihi Joshi | Aaron Chan | Ziyi Liu | Kiran Narahari | Takashi Shibuya | Ryosuke Mitani | Toshiyuki Sekiya | Jay Pujara | Xiang Ren
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

NLP models are susceptible to learning spurious biases (i.e., bugs) that work on some datasets but do not properly reflect the underlying task. Explanation-based model debugging aims to resolve spurious biases by showing human users explanations of model behavior, asking users to give feedback on the behavior, thenusing the feedback to update the model. While existing model debugging methods have shown promise, their prototype-level implementations provide limited practical utility. Thus, we propose XMD: the first open-source, end-to-end framework for explanation-based model debugging. Given task- or instance-level explanations,users can flexibly provide various forms of feedback via an intuitive, web-based UI. After receiving user feedback, XMD automatically updates the model in real time, by regularizing the model so that its explanationsalign with the user feedback. The new model can then be easily deployed into real-world applications via Hugging Face. Using XMD, we can improve the model’s OOD performance on text classification tasks by up to 18%.

2022

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UNIREX: A Unified Learning Framework for Language Model Rationale Extraction
Aaron Chan | Maziar Sanjabi | Lambert Mathias | Liang Tan | Shaoliang Nie | Xiaochang Peng | Xiang Ren | Hamed Firooz
Proceedings of BigScience Episode #5 -- Workshop on Challenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models

An extractive rationale explains a language model’s (LM’s) prediction on a given task instance by highlighting the text inputs that most influenced the prediction. Ideally, rationale extraction should be faithful (reflective of LM’s actual behavior) and plausible (convincing to humans), without compromising the LM’s (i.e., task model’s) task performance. Although attribution algorithms and select-predict pipelines are commonly used in rationale extraction, they both rely on certain heuristics that hinder them from satisfying all three desiderata. In light of this, we propose UNIREX, a flexible learning framework which generalizes rationale extractor optimization as follows: (1) specify architecture for a learned rationale extractor; (2) select explainability objectives (i.e., faithfulness and plausibility criteria); and (3) jointly the train task model and rationale extractor on the task using selected objectives. UNIREX enables replacing prior works’ heuristic design choices with a generic learned rationale extractor in (1) and optimizing it for all three desiderata in (2)-(3). To facilitate comparison between methods w.r.t. multiple desiderata, we introduce the Normalized Relative Gain (NRG) metric. Across five English text classification datasets, our best UNIREX configuration outperforms the strongest baselines by an average of 32.9% NRG. Plus, we find that UNIREX-trained rationale extractors’ faithfulness can even generalize to unseen datasets and tasks.

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ER-Test: Evaluating Explanation Regularization Methods for Language Models
Brihi Joshi | Aaron Chan | Ziyi Liu | Shaoliang Nie | Maziar Sanjabi | Hamed Firooz | Xiang Ren
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

By explaining how humans would solve a given task, human rationales can provide strong learning signal for neural language models (NLMs). Explanation regularization (ER) aims to improve NLM generalization by pushing the NLM’s machine rationales (Which input tokens did the NLM focus on?) to align with human rationales (Which input tokens would humans focus on). Though prior works primarily study ER via in-distribution (ID) evaluation, out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is often more critical in real-world scenarios, yet ER’s effect on OOD generalization has been underexplored.In this paper, we introduce ER-Test, a framework for evaluating ER models’ OOD generalization along three dimensions: unseen datasets, contrast set tests, and functional tests. Using ER-Test, we comprehensively analyze how ER models’ OOD generalization varies with the rationale alignment criterion (loss function), human rationale type (instance-level v/s task-level), number and choice of rationale-annotated instances, and time budget for rationale annotation. Across two tasks and six datasets, we show that ER has little impact on ID performance but yields large OOD performance gains, with the best ER criterion being task-dependent. Also, ER can improve OOD performance even with task-level or few human rationales. Finally, we find that rationale annotation is more time-efficient than label annotation for improving OOD performance. Our results with ER-Test help demonstrate ER’s utility and establish best practices for using ER effectively.

2021

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Learning Contextualized Knowledge Structures for Commonsense Reasoning
Jun Yan | Mrigank Raman | Aaron Chan | Tianyu Zhang | Ryan Rossi | Handong Zhao | Sungchul Kim | Nedim Lipka | Xiang Ren
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021