Prompt Waywardness: The Curious Case of Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts

Daniel Khashabi, Xinxi Lyu, Sewon Min, Lianhui Qin, Kyle Richardson, Sean Welleck, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Sameer Singh, Yejin Choi


Abstract
Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts that is faithful to the problem they solve. In practice, we observe a “wayward” behavior between the task solved by continuous prompts and their nearest neighbor discrete projections: We can find continuous prompts that solve a task while being projected to an arbitrary text (e.g., definition of a different or even a contradictory task), while being within a very small (2%) margin of the best continuous prompt of the same size for the task. We provide intuitions behind this odd and surprising behavior, as well as extensive empirical analyses quantifying the effect of various parameters. For instance, for larger model sizes we observe higher waywardness, i.e, we can find prompts that more closely map to any arbitrary text with a smaller drop in accuracy. These findings have important implications relating to the difficulty of faithfully interpreting continuous prompts and their generalization across models and tasks, providing guidance for future progress in prompting language models.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.266
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3631–3643
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.266
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.266
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daniel Khashabi, Xinxi Lyu, Sewon Min, Lianhui Qin, Kyle Richardson, Sean Welleck, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Sameer Singh, and Yejin Choi. 2022. Prompt Waywardness: The Curious Case of Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3631–3643, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Prompt Waywardness: The Curious Case of Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts (Khashabi et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.naacl-main.266.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.naacl-main.266.mp4
Code
 alrope123/prompt-waywardness
Data
AG NewsNatural InstructionsSST