Data Checklist: On Unit-Testing Datasets with Usable Information

Heidi Chenyu Zhang, Shabnam Behzad, Kawin Ethayarajh, Dan Jurafsky

Research Area: Alignment, Data, Evaluation

Keywords: data checklist, usable information, dataset artifact, preference alignment

TL;DR: We propose a data checklist consisting of 10 unit tests that diagnose dataset artifacts and ground model behavior in the data they are trained on.

Abstract:

Model checklists (Ribeiro et al., 2020) have emerged as a useful tool for understanding the behavior of LLMs, analogous to unit-testing in software engineering. However, despite datasets being a key determinant of model behavior, evaluating datasets -- e.g., for the existence of annotation artifacts -- is largely done ad hoc, once a problem in model behavior has already been found downstream.
In this work, we take a more principled approach to unit-testing datasets by proposing a taxonomy based on the $\mathcal{V}$-information literature. We call a collection of such unit tests a data checklist.
Using the checklist, not only are we able to recover known artifacts in well-known datasets such as SNLI, but we also discover previously unknown artifacts in preference datasets for LLM alignment.
Data checklists further enable a new kind of data filtering, which we use to improve the efficacy and data efficiency of preference alignment.

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Submission Number: 1131