Making Pre-trained Language Models both Task-solvers and
  Self-calibrators
Yangyi Chen Xingyao Wang Heng Ji
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) serve as backbones for various real-world
systems. For high-stake applications, it's equally essential to have reasonable
confidence estimations in predictions. While the vanilla confidence scores of
PLMs can already be effectively utilized, PLMs consistently become
overconfident in their wrong predictions, which is not desirable in practice.
Previous work shows that introducing an extra calibration task can mitigate
this issue. The basic idea involves acquiring additional data to train models
in predicting the confidence of their initial predictions. However, it only
demonstrates the feasibility of this kind of method, assuming that there are
abundant extra available samples for the introduced calibration task. In this
work, we consider the practical scenario that we need to effectively utilize
training samples to make PLMs both task-solvers and self-calibrators. Three
challenges are presented, including limited training samples, data imbalance,
and distribution shifts. We first conduct pilot experiments to quantify various
decisive factors in the calibration task. Based on the empirical analysis
results, we propose a training algorithm LM-TOAST to tackle the challenges.
Experimental results show that LM-TOAST can effectively utilize the training
data to make PLMs have reasonable confidence estimations while maintaining the
original task performance. Further, we consider three downstream applications,
namely selective classification, adversarial defense, and model cascading, to
show the practical usefulness of LM-TOAST. The code will be made public at
\url{https://github.com/Yangyi-Chen/LM-TOAST}.