# Exploring Contrast Consistency of Open-Domain Question Answering Systems on Minimally Edited Questions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14441 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14441/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [AmbigQA: Answering Ambiguous Open-domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10645/) (2020)
- [Entity-Based Knowledge Conflicts in Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05052/) (2021)
- [Generate rather than Retrieve: Large Language Models are Strong Context Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10063/) (2022)
- [Polyjuice: Generating Counterfactuals for Explaining, Evaluating, and Improving Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00288/) (2021)
- [PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07033/) (2021)
- [Facebook FAIR's WMT19 News Translation Task Submission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06616/) (2019)
- [Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00774/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05110/) (2022)
- [Condenser: a Pre-training Architecture for Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08253/) (2021)
- [Tailor: Generating and Perturbing Text with Semantic Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07150/) (2021)
- [R2-D2: A Modular Baseline for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03502/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-guided Counterfactual Generation for QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07596/) (2021)
- [Connecting Attributions and QA Model Behavior on Realistic Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04515/) (2021)
- [FiE: Building a Global Probability Space by Leveraging Early Fusion in Encoder for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10147/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Auto-Instruct: Automatic Instruction Generation and Ranking for Black-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13127/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Contrast-Consistent Ranking with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06991/) (2023)
- [Context Selection and Rewriting for Video-based Educational Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19406/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrast consistency, the ability of a model to make consistently correct predictions in the presence of perturbations, is an essential aspect in NLP. While studied in tasks such as sentiment analysis and reading comprehension, it remains unexplored in open-domain question answering (OpenQA) due to the difficulty of collecting perturbed questions that satisfy factuality requirements. In this work, we collect minimally edited questions as challenging contrast sets to evaluate OpenQA models. Our collection approach combines both human annotation and large language model generation. We find that the widely used dense passage retriever (DPR) performs poorly on our contrast sets, despite fitting the training set well and performing competitively on standard test sets. To address this issue, we introduce a simple and effective query-side contrastive loss with the aid of data augmentation to improve DPR training. Our experiments on the contrast sets demonstrate that DPR's contrast consistency is improved without sacrificing its accuracy on the standard test sets.