FLEX: Unifying Evaluation for Few-Shot NLPDownload PDF

Published: 09 Nov 2021, Last Modified: 22 Oct 2023NeurIPS 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: benchmarks, evaluation, few-shot, zero-shot, nlp, prompt-based models, pretrained language models, statistical analysis
TL;DR: FLEX Principles, benchmark, and leaderboard unifying best practices for evaluating few-shot NLP; and UniFew, a simple and strong prompt-based model by unifying pre-training and downstream task formats.
Abstract: Few-shot NLP research is highly active, yet conducted in disjoint research threads with evaluation suites that lack challenging-yet-realistic testing setups and fail to employ careful experimental design. Consequently, the community does not know which techniques perform best or even if they outperform simple baselines. In response, we formulate the FLEX Principles, a set of requirements and best practices for unified, rigorous, valid, and cost-sensitive few-shot NLP evaluation. These principles include Sample Size Design, a novel approach to benchmark design that optimizes statistical accuracy and precision while keeping evaluation costs manageable. Following the principles, we release the FLEX benchmark, which includes four few-shot transfer settings, zero-shot evaluation, and a public leaderboard that covers diverse NLP tasks. In addition, we present UniFew, a prompt-based model for few-shot learning that unifies pretraining and finetuning prompt formats, eschewing complex machinery of recent prompt-based approaches in adapting downstream task formats to language model pretraining objectives. We demonstrate that despite simplicity, UniFew achieves results competitive with both popular meta-learning and prompt-based approaches.
Supplementary Material: pdf
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Code: https://github.com/allenai/flex
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 15 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2107.07170/code)
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