{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/exploring-language-model-generalization-in","title":"Exploring Language Model Generalization in Low-Resource Extractive QA","arxiv_id":"2409.18446","date":"2024-09-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Saptarshi Sengupta","Wenpeng Yin","Preslav Nakov","Shreya Ghosh","Suhang Wang"],"abstract":"In this paper, we investigate Extractive Question Answering (EQA) with Large Language Models (LLMs) under domain drift, i.e., can LLMs generalize to domains that require specific knowledge such as medicine and law in a zero-shot fashion without additional in-domain training? To this end, we devise a series of experiments to explain the performance gap empirically. Our findings suggest that: (a) LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains such as retrieving long answer spans; (b) Certain LLMs, despite showing strong overall performance, display weaknesses in meeting basic requirements as discriminating between domain-specific senses of words which we link to pre-processing decisions; (c) Scaling model parameters is not always effective for cross domain generalization; and (d) Closed-domain datasets are quantitatively much different than open-domain EQA datasets and current LLMs struggle to deal with them. Our findings point out important directions for improving existing LLMs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18446v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.18446v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"exploring-language-model-generalization-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/saptarshi059/generalization-hypothesis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"domain-generalization","task_name":"Domain Generalization"},{"task_slug":"extractive-question-answering","task_name":"Extractive Question-Answering"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}