Methods for Estimating and Improving Robustness of Language Models

Abstract: Despite their outstanding performance, LLMs suffer notorious flaws related to their preference for simple, surface-level textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. This proposal investigates a common denominator of this problem in their weak ability to generalise outside of the training domain. We survey diverse research directions providing estimations of model generalisation ability and find that incorporating some of these measures in the training objectives leads to enhanced distributional robustness of neural models. Based on these findings, we present future research directions towards enhancing the robustness of LLMs.