Can We Improve Model Robustness through Secondary Attribute Counterfactuals?
Ananth Balashankar, Xuezhi Wang, Ben Packer, Nithum Thain, Ed Chi, Alex Beutel
Abstract
Developing robust NLP models that perform well on many, even small, slices of data is a significant but important challenge, with implications from fairness to general reliability. To this end, recent research has explored how models rely on spurious correlations, and how counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) can mitigate such issues. In this paper we study how and why modeling counterfactuals over multiple attributes can go significantly further in improving model performance. We propose RDI, a context-aware methodology which takes into account the impact of secondary attributes on the model’s predictions and increases sensitivity for secondary attributes over reweighted counterfactually augmented data. By implementing RDI in the context of toxicity detection, we find that accounting for secondary attributes can significantly improve robustness, with improvements in sliced accuracy on the original dataset up to 7% compared to existing robustness methods. We also demonstrate that RDI generalizes to the coreference resolution task and provide guidelines to extend this to other tasks.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.emnlp-main.386
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
- Editors:
- Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4701–4712
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.386
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.386
- Cite (ACL):
- Ananth Balashankar, Xuezhi Wang, Ben Packer, Nithum Thain, Ed Chi, and Alex Beutel. 2021. Can We Improve Model Robustness through Secondary Attribute Counterfactuals?. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4701–4712, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Can We Improve Model Robustness through Secondary Attribute Counterfactuals? (Balashankar et al., EMNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2021.emnlp-main.386.pdf