# How Does Diffusion Influence Pretrained Language Models on Out-of-Distribution Data?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.13949 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13949/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Discrete and text diffusion, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 25 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Discrete and text diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/discrete-and-text-diffusion/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [Multi30K: Multilingual English-German Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.00459/) (2016)
- [Accuracy on the Line: On the Strong Correlation Between Out-of-Distribution and In-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04649/) (2021)
- [DiffusionBERT: Improving Generative Masked Language Models with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15029/) (2022)
- [Self-conditioned Embedding Diffusion for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04236/) (2022)
- [Denoising diffusion models for out-of-distribution detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07740/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Language Models to Input Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12237/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Out-of-Distribution Detection for Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08812/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Mahalanobis Distance for Transformer-Based Out-of-Domain Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03778/) (2021)
- [Gradient-Based Constrained Sampling from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12558/) (2022)
- [An Investigation of the (In)effectiveness of Counterfactually Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00753/) (2021)
- [Interpreting the Robustness of Neural NLP Models to Textual Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07159/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in modern NLP. An important advantage of PLMs is good out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Recently, diffusion models have attracted a lot of work to apply diffusion to PLMs. It remains under-explored how diffusion influences PLMs on OOD data. The core of diffusion models is a forward diffusion process which gradually applies Gaussian noise to inputs, and a reverse denoising process which removes noise. The noised input reconstruction is a fundamental ability of diffusion models. We directly analyze OOD robustness by measuring the reconstruction loss, including testing the abilities to reconstruct OOD data, and to detect OOD samples. Experiments are conducted by analyzing different training parameters and data statistical features on eight datasets. It shows that finetuning PLMs with diffusion degrades the reconstruction ability on OOD data. The comparison also shows that diffusion models can effectively detect OOD samples, achieving state-of-the-art performance in most of the datasets with an absolute accuracy improvement up to 18%. These results indicate that diffusion reduces OOD robustness of PLMs.