Did the Model Understand the Question?

Pramod Kaushik Mudrakarta, Ankur Taly, Mukund Sundararajan, Kedar Dhamdhere


Abstract
We analyze state-of-the-art deep learning models for three tasks: question answering on (1) images, (2) tables, and (3) passages of text. Using the notion of “attribution” (word importance), we find that these deep networks often ignore important question terms. Leveraging such behavior, we perturb questions to craft a variety of adversarial examples. Our strongest attacks drop the accuracy of a visual question answering model from 61.1% to 19%, and that of a tabular question answering model from 33.5% to 3.3%. Additionally, we show how attributions can strengthen attacks proposed by Jia and Liang (2017) on paragraph comprehension models. Our results demonstrate that attributions can augment standard measures of accuracy and empower investigation of model performance. When a model is accurate but for the wrong reasons, attributions can surface erroneous logic in the model that indicates inadequacies in the test data.
Anthology ID:
P18-1176
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1896–1906
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1176
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1176
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pramod Kaushik Mudrakarta, Ankur Taly, Mukund Sundararajan, and Kedar Dhamdhere. 2018. Did the Model Understand the Question?. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1896–1906, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Did the Model Understand the Question? (Mudrakarta et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1176.pdf
Note:
 P18-1176.Notes.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-1176.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P18-1176.mp4
Code
 pramodkaushik/acl18_results +  additional community code
Data
Visual Question AnsweringWikiTableQuestions