# InfFeed: Influence Functions as a Feedback to Improve the Performance of Subjective Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14702 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14702/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02685/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07328/) (2017)
- [HateXplain: A Benchmark Dataset for Explainable Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10289/) (2020)
- [European Union regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a "right to explanation"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08813/) (2016)
- [An Investigation of Why Overparameterization Exacerbates Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04345/) (2020)
- [Mitigating Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing: Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08976/) (2019)
- [Influence Functions in Deep Learning Are Fragile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14651/) (2020)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Racial Bias in Hate Speech and Abusive Language Detection Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12516/) (2019)
- [Deep k-Nearest Neighbors: Towards Confident, Interpretable and Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04765/) (2018)
- [HateBERT: Retraining BERT for Abusive Language Detection in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12472/) (2020)
- [A Meta-Transfer Objective for Learning to Disentangle Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10912/) (2019)
- [Explaining Black Box Predictions and Unveiling Data Artifacts through Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06676/) (2020)
- [Breaking NLI Systems with Sentences that Require Simple Lexical Inferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02266/) (2018)
- [FastIF: Scalable Influence Functions for Efficient Model Interpretation and Debugging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15781/) (2020)
- [Troubling Trends in Machine Learning Scholarship](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03341/) (2018)
- [What Would Elsa Do? Freezing Layers During Transformer Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03090/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Reweighting to Rewriting: Unlocking the Intervention Effects of Influential Samples in Training Data Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02771/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, influence functions present an apparatus for achieving explainability for deep neural models by quantifying the perturbation of individual train instances that might impact a test prediction. Our objectives in this paper are twofold. First we incorporate influence functions as a feedback into the model to improve its performance. Second, in a dataset extension exercise, using influence functions to automatically identify data points that have been initially `silver' annotated by some existing method and need to be cross-checked (and corrected) by annotators to improve the model performance. To meet these objectives, in this paper, we introduce InfFeed, which uses influence functions to compute the influential instances for a target instance. Toward the first objective, we adjust the label of the target instance based on its influencer(s) label. In doing this, InfFeed outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines (including LLMs) by a maximum macro F1-score margin of almost 4% for hate speech classification, 3.5% for stance classification, and 3% for irony and 2% for sarcasm detection. Toward the second objective we show that manually re-annotating only those silver annotated data points in the extension set that have a negative influence can immensely improve the model performance bringing it very close to the scenario where all the data points in the extension set have gold labels. This allows for huge reduction of the number of data points that need to be manually annotated since out of the silver annotated extension dataset, the influence function scheme picks up ~1/1000 points that need manual correction.