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Poster
The Effect of Natural Distribution Shift on Question Answering Models
John Miller · Karl Krauth · Benjamin Recht · Ludwig Schmidt

Tue Jul 14 07:00 AM -- 07:45 AM & Tue Jul 14 06:00 PM -- 06:45 PM (PDT) @
in Poster Session 1 »

We build four new test sets for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and evaluate the ability of question-answering systems to generalize to new data. Our first test set is from the original Wikipedia domain and measures the extent to which existing systems overfit the original test set. Despite several years of heavy test set re-use, we find no evidence of adaptive overfitting. The remaining three test sets are constructed from New York Times articles, Reddit posts, and Amazon product reviews and measure robustness to natural distribution shifts. Across a broad range of models, we observe average performance drops of 3.8, 14.0, and 17.4 F1 points, respectively. In contrast, a strong human baseline matches or exceeds the performance of SQuAD models on the original domain and exhibits little to no drop in new domains. Taken together, our results confirm the surprising resilience of the holdout method and emphasize the need to move towards evaluation metrics that incorporate robustness to natural distribution shifts.

Keywords: Robust Statistics and Machine Learning · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Author Information

John Miller (University of California, Berkeley)
Karl Krauth (UC Berkeley)
Benjamin Recht (Berkeley)

Benjamin Recht is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Ben's research group studies the theory and practice of optimization algorithms with a focus on applications in machine learning, data analysis, and controls. Ben is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, and the 2017 NIPS Test of Time Award.

Ludwig Schmidt (University of California, Berkeley)

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