Question: What issues do the solution proposed by the authors address?
Evidence: Progress in AI has been driven by, among other things, the development of challenging large-scale benchmarks like ImageNet BIBREF0 in computer vision, and SNLI BIBREF1, SQuAD BIBREF2, and others in natural language processing (NLP). Recently, for natural language understanding (NLU) in particular, the focus has shifted to combined benchmarks like SentEval BIBREF3 and GLUE BIBREF4, which track model performance on multiple tasks and provide a unified platform for analysis.
With the rapid pace of advancement in AI, however, NLU benchmarks struggle to keep up with model improvement. Whereas it took around 15 years to achieve “near-human performance” on MNIST BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7 and approximately 7 years to surpass humans on ImageNet BIBREF8, BIBREF0, BIBREF9, the GLUE benchmark did not last as long as we would have hoped after the advent of BERT BIBREF10, and rapidly had to be extended into SuperGLUE BIBREF11. This raises an important question: Can we collect a large benchmark dataset that can last longer?
The speed with which benchmarks become obsolete raises another important question: are current NLU models genuinely as good as their high performance on benchmarks suggests? A growing body of evidence shows that state-of-the-art models learn to exploit spurious statistical patterns in datasets BIBREF12, BIBREF13, BIBREF14, BIBREF15, BIBREF16, BIBREF17, instead of learning meaning in the flexible and generalizable way that humans do. Given this, human annotators—be they seasoned NLP researchers or non-experts—might easily be able to construct examples that expose model brittleness.
We propose an iterative, adversarial human-and-model-in-the-loop solution for NLU dataset collection that addresses both benchmark longevity and robustness issues. In the first stage, human annotators devise examples that our current best models cannot determine the correct label for. These resulting hard examples—which should expose additional model weaknesses—can be added to the training set and used to train a stronger model. We then subject the strengthened model to human interference and collect more weaknesses over several rounds. After each round, we both train a new model, and set aside a new test set. The process can be iteratively repeated in a never-ending learning BIBREF18 setting, with the model getting stronger and the test set getting harder in each new round.This process yields a “moving post” dynamic target for NLU systems, rather than a static benchmark that will eventually saturate.
Our approach draws inspiration from recent efforts that gamify collaborative training of machine learning agents over multiple rounds BIBREF19 and pit “builders” against “breakers” to learn better models BIBREF20. Recently, Dinan2019build showed that a similar approach can be used to make dialogue safety classifiers more robust. Here, we focus on natural language inference (NLI), arguably the most canonical task in NLU. We collected three rounds of data, and call our new dataset Adversarial NLI (ANLI).
Our contributions are as follows: 1) We introduce a novel human-and-model-in-the-loop dataset, currently consisting of three rounds that progressively increase in difficulty and complexity, that includes annotator-provided explanations. 2) We show that training models on this new dataset leads to state-of-the-art performance on a variety of popular NLI benchmarks. 3) We provide a detailed analysis of the collected data that sheds light on the shortcomings of current models, categorizes the data by inference type to examine weaknesses, and demonstrates good performance on NLI stress tests. The ANLI dataset is available at github.com/facebookresearch/anli/. A demo of the annotation procedure can be viewed at adversarialnli.com.
We propose an iterative, adversarial human-andmodel-in-the-loop solution for NLU dataset collection that addresses both benchmark longevity and robustness issues.
Answer: Benchmark longevity and robustness issues.