PairCFR: Enhancing Model Training on Paired Counterfactually Augmented Data through Contrastive Learning

Xiaoqi Qiu, Yongjie Wang, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Yu Yue, Yuhong Feng, Chunyan Miao


Abstract
Counterfactually Augmented Data (CAD) involves creating new data samples by applying minimal yet sufficient modifications to flip the label of existing data samples to other classes. Training with CAD enhances model robustness against spurious features that happen to correlate with labels by spreading the casual relationships across different classes. Yet, recent research reveals that training with CAD may lead models to overly focus on modified features while ignoring other important contextual information, inadvertently introducing biases that may impair performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. To mitigate this issue, we employ contrastive learning to promote global feature alignment in addition to learning counterfactual clues. We theoretically prove that contrastive loss can encourage models to leverage a broader range of features beyond those modified ones. Comprehensive experiments on two human-edited CAD datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on OOD datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.646
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11955–11971
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.646
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoqi Qiu, Yongjie Wang, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Yu Yue, Yuhong Feng, and Chunyan Miao. 2024. PairCFR: Enhancing Model Training on Paired Counterfactually Augmented Data through Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11955–11971, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PairCFR: Enhancing Model Training on Paired Counterfactually Augmented Data through Contrastive Learning (Qiu et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.646.pdf