Enhancing Self-Consistency and Performance of Pre-Trained Language Models through Natural Language Inference

Eric Mitchell, Joseph Noh, Siyan Li, Will Armstrong, Ananth Agarwal, Patrick Liu, Chelsea Finn, Christopher Manning


Abstract
While large pre-trained language models are powerful, their predictions often lack logical consistency across test inputs. For example, a state-of-the-art Macaw question-answering (QA) model answers <i>Yes</i> to <i>Is a sparrow a bird?</i> and <i>Does a bird have feet?</i> but answers <i>No</i> to <i>Does a sparrow have feet?</i>. To address this failure mode, we propose a framework, Consistency Correction through Relation Detection, or <b>ConCoRD</b>, for boosting the consistency and accuracy of pre-trained NLP models using pre-trained natural language inference (NLI) models without fine-tuning or re-training. Given a batch of test inputs, ConCoRD samples several candidate outputs for each input and instantiates a factor graph that accounts for both the model’s belief about the likelihood of each answer choice in isolation and the NLI model’s beliefs about pair-wise answer choice compatibility. We show that a weighted MaxSAT solver can efficiently compute high-quality answer choices under this factor graph, improving over the raw model’s predictions. Our experiments demonstrate that ConCoRD consistently boosts accuracy and consistency of off-the-shelf closed-book QA and VQA models using off-the-shelf NLI models, notably increasing accuracy of LXMERT on ConVQA by 5% absolute. See the project website (https://ericmitchell.ai/emnlp-2022-concord/) for code and data.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.115
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1754–1768
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.115
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eric Mitchell, Joseph Noh, Siyan Li, Will Armstrong, Ananth Agarwal, Patrick Liu, Chelsea Finn, and Christopher Manning. 2022. Enhancing Self-Consistency and Performance of Pre-Trained Language Models through Natural Language Inference. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1754–1768, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Self-Consistency and Performance of Pre-Trained Language Models through Natural Language Inference (Mitchell et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.emnlp-main.115.pdf