Test-time Augmentation for Factual Probing
Go Kamoda Benjamin Heinzerling Keisuke Sakaguchi Kentaro Inui
Factual probing is a method that uses prompts to test if a language model
"knows" certain world knowledge facts. A problem in factual probing is that
small changes to the prompt can lead to large changes in model output. Previous
work aimed to alleviate this problem by optimizing prompts via text mining or
fine-tuning. However, such approaches are relation-specific and do not
generalize to unseen relation types. Here, we propose to use test-time
augmentation (TTA) as a relation-agnostic method for reducing sensitivity to
prompt variations by automatically augmenting and ensembling prompts at test
time. Experiments show improved model calibration, i.e., with TTA, model
confidence better reflects prediction accuracy. Improvements in prediction
accuracy are observed for some models, but for other models, TTA leads to
degradation. Error analysis identifies the difficulty of producing high-quality
prompt variations as the main challenge for TTA.