Papers › CORE: A Retrieve-then-Edit Framework for Counterfactual Data Generation

CORE: A Retrieve-then-Edit Framework for Counterfactual Data Generation

10 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.04873archive 2025-07-28

Tanay Dixit, Bhargavi Paranjape, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer

Counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) -- i.e., adding minimally perturbed inputs during training -- helps reduce model reliance on spurious correlations and improves generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Prior work on generating counterfactuals only considered restricted classes of perturbations, limiting their effectiveness. We present COunterfactual Generation via Retrieval and Editing (CORE), a retrieval-augmented generation framework for creating diverse counterfactual perturbations for CDA. For each training example, CORE first performs a dense retrieval over a task-related unlabeled text corpus using a learned bi-encoder and extracts relevant counterfactual excerpts. CORE then incorporates these into prompts to a large language model with few-shot learning capabilities, for counterfactual editing. Conditioning language model edits on naturally occurring data results in diverse perturbations. Experiments on natural language inference and sentiment analysis benchmarks show that CORE counterfactuals are more effective at improving generalization to OOD data compared to other DA approaches. We also show that the CORE retrieval framework can be used to encourage diversity in manually authored perturbations

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

tanay2001/core officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Data AugmentationDiversityFew-Shot LearningLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelNatural Language InferenceRetrievalRetrieval-augmented GenerationSentiment Analysis

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Counterfactuals

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections