Attention-Focused Adversarial Training for Robust Temporal Reasoning

Lis Pereira, Kevin Duh, Fei Cheng, Ichiro Kobayashi

Abstract: We propose an enhanced adversarial training algorithm for fine-tuning transformer-based language models (i.e., RoBERTa) and apply it to the temporal reasoning task. Current adversarial training approaches for NLP add the adversarial perturbation only to the embedding layer, ignoring the other layers of the model, which might limit the generalization power of adversarial training. Instead, our algorithm searches for the best combination of layers to add the adversarial perturbation. We add the adversarial perturbation to multiple hidden states or attention representations of the model layers. Adding the perturbation to the attention representations performed best in our experiments. Our model can improve performance on several temporal reasoning benchmarks, and establishes new state-of-the-art results.