@inproceedings{waldis-etal-2024-dive,
    title = "Dive into the Chasm: Probing the Gap between In- and Cross-Topic Generalization",
    author = "Waldis, Andreas  and
      Hou, Yufang  and
      Gurevych, Iryna",
    editor = "Graham, Yvette  and
      Purver, Matthew",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024",
    month = mar,
    year = "2024",
    address = "St. Julian{'}s, Malta",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2024.findings-eacl.146/",
    pages = "2197--2214",
    abstract = "Pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform well in In-Topic setups, where training and testing data come from the same topics. However, they face challenges in Cross-Topic scenarios where testing data is derived from distinct topics. This paper analyzes various PLMs with three probing-based experiments to better understand the reasons behind such generalization gaps. For the first time, we demonstrate that the extent of these generalization gaps and the sensitivity to token-level interventions vary significantly across PLMs. By evaluating large language models (LLMs), we show the usefulness of our analysis for these recent models. Overall, we observe diverse pre-training objectives and architectural regularization contribute to more robust PLMs and mitigate generalization gaps. Our research contributes to a deeper understanding and comparison of language models across different generalization scenarios."
}