| Challenge: | Despite widespread adoption of probes, differences in their accuracy fail to adequately reflect differences in representations. |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative to the standard probes, information-theoretic probing with minimum description length (MDL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method agrees in results and is more informative and stable than the standard probes. |
Similar Papers
Information-Theoretic Probing for Linguistic Structure (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks are the backbone of modern stateof-the-art natural language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an information-theoretic operationalization of probing as estimating mutual information that contradicts received wisdom . they evaluate on a set of ten typologically diverse languages often underrepresented in NLP research—plus English—totalling eleven languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on ten typologically diverse languages and English on 11 languages. |
Conditional probing: measuring usable information beyond a baseline (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for probing representations are limited to predicting part-of-speech . current methods cannot detect when a representation is predictive of just aspects of part- of-seech not explainable by the word identity. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition on the information in a baseline representation to test whether it is predictive of part-of-speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a theory of usable information called V-information and conditions on the information in the baseline. |
An information theoretic view on selecting linguistic probes (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP tasks require a question of how much linguistic knowledge is encoded in neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use diagnostic classifiers to perform supervised classification from internal representations. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the two proposed criteria lead to results that agree with each other. |
Probing the Probing Paradigm: Does Probing Accuracy Entail Task Relevance? (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural models have established state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks, but little is understood about the mechanisms by which they operate. |
| Approach: | They examine the probing paradigm through a set of controlled synthetic tasks and show that pretrained word embeddings play a considerable role in encoding these properties rather than the training task itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode linguistic properties above chance-level even when distributed in the data as random noise, reversing the interpretation of absolute claims on probing tasks. |
On the data requirements of probing (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to probe neural networks are expensive and require large datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to estimate the required number of data samples in probing datasets . they use a classification task to encode a text with a deep neural network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method estimates the required number of data samples in two probing configurations and proves it is statistically powerful. |
A Bayesian Framework for Information-Theoretic Probing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent paper suggests that probing should be seen as approximating a mutual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian mutual information framework that probes probing representations from the perspective of Bayes' agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows for more intuitive results in scenarios with finite data. |
Probing as Quantifying Inductive Bias (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained contextual representations have led to performance improvements on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian framework that quantifies the amount of inductive bias that the representations encode on a specific task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework alleviates many problems found in probing and can offer better inductive bias than BERT. |
Does My Representation Capture X? Probe-Ably (2021.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Probing (or diagnostic classification) has become a popular strategy for investigating whether a given set of intermediate features is present in the representations of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an extendable probing framework to automate the application of probing methods to the user’s inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework automates the application of probing methods to the user’s inputs. |
Low-Complexity Probing via Finding Subnetworks (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to probing neural networks for linguistic properties are to train a shallow multi-layer perceptron (MLP) on top of the model's internal representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a subtractive pruning-based probe where they find an existing subnetwork that performs the linguistic task of interest. |
| Outcome: | The proposed probe achieves higher accuracy on pre-trained models and lower accuracy on random models, and better learning on its own. |
COPEN: Probing Conceptual Knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge probing studies focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) but ignore conceptual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They evaluate conceptual knowledge of pre-trained language models by annotating 24k data instances covering 393 concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks evaluate pre-trained language models' conceptual knowledge of entities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts. |