| Challenge: | Recent work in image classification and extractive question answering have observed that pre-trained models trained on less in-distribution data have better out-of-distortion performance. |
| Approach: | They conduct a large empirical study to investigate the relationship between sample efficiency and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The results show that pre-trained models with lower sample efficiency perform better on some tasks but not others. |
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Whispers of Doubt Amidst Echoes of Triumph in NLP Robustness (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to measure robustness are problematic, and out-of-domain evaluations are no longer relevant. |
| Approach: | They examine models of different sizes spanning different architectural choices and pretraining objectives. |
| Outcome: | The results show that not all out-of-domain tests provide insight into robustness . merely scaling models does not make them adequately robust . |
Measure and Improve Robustness in NLP Models: A Survey (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the performance gains, NLP models are still fragile and brittle to out-of-domain data, adversarial attacks, or small perturbation to the input. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey of how to define, measure and improve robustness in NLP by connecting multiple definitions of robustness and identifying failures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are robust against unseen or challenging scenarios, but are still fragile and brittle to out-of-domain data and adversarial attacks. |
Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained Transformers are more effective at detecting anomalous or OOD examples, while many previous models are frequently worse than chance. |
| Approach: | They construct a new robustness benchmark with real distribution shifts to measure out-of-distribution generalization for seven NLP datasets and compare them to previous models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalizations for seven datasets show that pretrained Transformers are significantly less effective at detecting anomalous or OOD examples, while many previous models are often worse than chance. |
Generalized but not Robust? Comparing the Effects of Data Modification Methods on Out-of-Domain Generalization and Adversarial Robustness (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Data modification has been proposed as an effective solution for generalizing to out-of-domain (OOD) inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data modification to generalize to out-of-domain inputs . they also analyze their adversarial robustness using a synthetic dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed data modification strategies improve OOD accuracy and AR, but data filtering hurts OOD on other tasks. |
Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Natural Language Processing: Past, Present, and Future (2023.emnlp-main)
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Linyi Yang, Yaoxian Song, Xuan Ren, Chenyang Lyu, Yidong Wang, Jingming Zhuo, Lingqiao Liu, Jindong Wang, Jennifer Foster, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing literature on the generalization of machine learning models to out-of-distribution data is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to present the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed survey provides the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding. |
Investigating Ensemble Methods for Model Robustness Improvement of Text Classifiers (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce model's reliance on bias features ignore the learnability of these features. |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce models' reliance on bias features by first training models with fixed low-capacity models which ignore the learnability of the bias features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can perform better on out-of-distribution datasets than baseline models with a more sophisticated model design. |
Improving the OOD Performance of Closed-Source LLMs on NLI Through Strategic Data Selection (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve robustness require changing the fine-tuning process or large-scale data augmentation, which are infeasible or cost prohibitive for closed-source models. |
| Approach: | They propose to prioritize more complex examples or replace existing training examples with LLM-generated data to improve performance on OOD NLI datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on difficult OOD datasets while training with synthetic data leads to substantial improvements on easier OOD data. |
Think Twice: Measuring the Efficiency of Eliminating Prediction Shortcuts of Question Answering Models (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are not robust to complex language understanding tasks due to reliance on spurious correlations of training datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for measuring model reliance on spurious features by exploiting chosen biases on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that the reported OOD gains of debiasing methods can't be explained by mitigated reliance on biased features, suggesting that biases are shared among different QA datasets. |
Methods for Estimating and Improving Robustness of Language Models (2022.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from weak generalisation ability due to shallow textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate some of these measures into training objectives to enhance distributional robustness of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform human models on complex tasks and outperformed other models on deep networks. |
Interpreting the Robustness of Neural NLP Models to Textual Perturbations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Modern Natural Language Processing models are sensitive to input perturbations and their performance can decrease when applied to noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose to explain the extent to which a model is affected by an unseen textual perturbation by the learnability of the perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is better at identifying a perturbation (higher learnability) but worse at ignoring it (lower robustness). |