# IDANI: Inference-time Domain Adaptation via Neuron-level Interventions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00259 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00259/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [What Is One Grain of Sand in the Desert? Analyzing Individual Neurons in Deep NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09355/) (2018)
- [Analyzing Individual Neurons in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02695/) (2020)
- [Neuron-level Interpretation of Deep NLP Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13138/) (2021)
- [On the Pitfalls of Analyzing Individual Neurons in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07483/) (2021)
- [Intrinsic Probing through Dimension Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02812/) (2020)
- [PERL: Pivot-based Domain Adaptation for Pre-trained Deep Contextualized Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09075/) (2020)
- [Example-based Hypernetworks for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14276/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Discovering Knowledge-Critical Subnetworks in Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03084/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Neuron Interpretation Methods of NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12608/) (2023)
- [From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18503/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large pre-trained models are usually fine-tuned on downstream task data, and tested on unseen data. When the train and test data come from different domains, the model is likely to struggle, as it is not adapted to the test domain. We propose a new approach for domain adaptation (DA), using neuron-level interventions: We modify the representation of each test example in specific neurons, resulting in a counterfactual example from the source domain, which the model is more familiar with. The modified example is then fed back into the model. While most other DA methods are applied during training time, ours is applied during inference only, making it more efficient and applicable. Our experiments show that our method improves performance on unseen domains.