Not Eliminate but Aggregate: Post-Hoc Control over Mixture-of-Experts to Address Shortcut Shifts in Natural Language Understanding
On the map: Mixture-of-experts → MoE large language models
Abstract (arXiv)
Recent models for natural language understanding are inclined to exploit simple patterns in datasets, commonly known as shortcuts. These shortcuts hinge on spurious correlations between labels and latent features existing in the training data. At inference time, shortcut-dependent models are likely to generate erroneous predictions under distribution shifts, particularly when some latent features are no longer correlated with the labels. To avoid this, previous studies have trained models to eliminate the reliance on shortcuts. In this study, we explore a different direction: pessimistically aggregating the predictions of a mixture-of-experts, assuming each expert captures relatively different latent features. The experimental results demonstrate that our post-hoc control over the experts significantly enhances the model's robustness to the distribution shift in shortcuts. Besides, we show that our approach has some practical advantages. We also analyze our model and provide results to support the assumption.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in MoE large language models, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts. Builds on 61 of its 86 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2024.
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