English

Misleading Failures of Partial-input Baselines

Machine Learning 2019-06-19 v3 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent work establishes dataset difficulty and removes annotation artifacts via partial-input baselines (e.g., hypothesis-only models for SNLI or question-only models for VQA). When a partial-input baseline gets high accuracy, a dataset is cheatable. However, the converse is not necessarily true: the failure of a partial-input baseline does not mean a dataset is free of artifacts. To illustrate this, we first design artificial datasets which contain trivial patterns in the full input that are undetectable by any partial-input model. Next, we identify such artifacts in the SNLI dataset - a hypothesis-only model augmented with trivial patterns in the premise can solve 15% of the examples that are previously considered "hard". Our work provides a caveat for the use of partial-input baselines for dataset verification and creation.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.05778,
  title  = {Misleading Failures of Partial-input Baselines},
  author = {Shi Feng and Eric Wallace and Jordan Boyd-Graber},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.05778},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

ACL 2019

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:06:31.131Z