Measuring and Improving Attentiveness to Partial Inputs with
  Counterfactuals
Yanai Elazar Bhargavi Paranjape Hao Peng Sarah Wiegreffe Khyathi Raghavi Vivek Srikumar Sameer Singh Noah A. Smith
The inevitable appearance of spurious correlations in training datasets hurts
the generalization of NLP models on unseen data. Previous work has found that
datasets with paired inputs are prone to correlations between a specific part
of the input (e.g., the hypothesis in NLI) and the label; consequently, models
trained only on those outperform chance. Are these correlations picked up by
models trained on the full input data? To address this question, we propose a
new evaluation method, Counterfactual Attentiveness Test (CAT). CAT uses
counterfactuals by replacing part of the input with its counterpart from a
different example (subject to some restrictions), expecting an attentive model
to change its prediction. Using CAT, we systematically investigate established
supervised and in-context learning models on ten datasets spanning four tasks:
natural language inference, reading comprehension, paraphrase detection, and
visual & language reasoning. CAT reveals that reliance on such correlations is
mainly data-dependent. Surprisingly, we find that GPT3 becomes less attentive
with an increased number of demonstrations, while its accuracy on the test data
improves. Our results demonstrate that augmenting training or demonstration
data with counterfactuals is effective in improving models' attentiveness. We
show that models' attentiveness measured by CAT reveals different conclusions
from solely measuring correlations in data.