P-Adapters: Robustly Extracting Factual Information from Language Models with Diverse Prompts
Authors: Benjamin Newman,Prafulla Kumar Choubey,Nazneen Rajani
ICLR 2022,Poster

Abstract: Recent work (e.g. LAMA (Petroni et al., 2019)) has found that the quality of the factual information extracted from Large Language Models (LLMs) depends on the prompts used to query them. This inconsistency is problematic because different users will query LLMs for the same information using different wording, but should receive the same, accurate responses regardless. In this work we aim to address this shortcoming by introducing P-Adapters: lightweight models that sit between the embedding layer and first attention layer of LLMs. They take LLM embeddings as input and output continuous prompts that are used to query the LLM. Additionally, we investigate Mixture of Experts (MoE) models that learn a set of continuous prompts (the "experts") and select one to query the LLM. These require a separate classifier trained on human-annotated data to map natural language prompts to the continuous ones. P-Adapters perform comparably to the more complex MoE models in extracting factual information from BERT and RoBERTa while eliminating the need for additional annotations. P-Adapters show between 12-26% absolute improvement in precision and 36-50% absolute improvement in consistency over a baseline of just using natural language queries alone. Finally, we investigate what makes P-Adapters successful and conclude that a significant factor is access to the LLM's embeddings of the original natural language prompt, particularly the subject of the entity pair being queried.