Regression Bugs Are In Your Model! Measuring, Reducing and Analyzing Regressions In NLP Model Updates

Yuqing Xie, Yi-An Lai, Yuanjun Xiong, Yi Zhang, Stefano Soatto


Abstract
Behavior of deep neural networks can be inconsistent between different versions. Regressions during model update are a common cause of concern that often over-weigh the benefits in accuracy or efficiency gain. This work focuses on quantifying, reducing and analyzing regression errors in the NLP model updates. Using negative flip rate as regression measure, we show that regression has a prevalent presence across tasks in the GLUE benchmark. We formulate the regression-free model updates into a constrained optimization problem, and further reduce it into a relaxed form which can be approximately optimized through knowledge distillation training method. We empirically analyze how model ensemble reduces regression. Finally, we conduct CheckList behavioral testing to understand the distribution of regressions across linguistic phenomena, and the efficacy of ensemble and distillation methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.515
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6589–6602
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.515
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.515
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuqing Xie, Yi-An Lai, Yuanjun Xiong, Yi Zhang, and Stefano Soatto. 2021. Regression Bugs Are In Your Model! Measuring, Reducing and Analyzing Regressions In NLP Model Updates. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6589–6602, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Regression Bugs Are In Your Model! Measuring, Reducing and Analyzing Regressions In NLP Model Updates (Xie et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.acl-long.515.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.acl-long.515.mp4
Data
CoLAGLUEMRPCMultiNLISSTSST-2