{"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/towards-robust-extractive-question-answering","title":"Towards Robust Extractive Question Answering Models: Rethinking the Training Methodology","arxiv_id":"2409.19766","date":"2024-09-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Son Quoc Tran","Matt Kretchmar"],"abstract":"This paper proposes a novel training method to improve the robustness of Extractive Question Answering (EQA) models. Previous research has shown that existing models, when trained on EQA datasets that include unanswerable questions, demonstrate a significant lack of robustness against distribution shifts and adversarial attacks. Despite this, the inclusion of unanswerable questions in EQA training datasets is essential for ensuring real-world reliability. Our proposed training method includes a novel loss function for the EQA problem and challenges an implicit assumption present in numerous EQA datasets. Models trained with our method maintain in-domain performance while achieving a notable improvement on out-of-domain datasets. This results in an overall F1 score improvement of 5.7 across all testing sets. Furthermore, our models exhibit significantly enhanced robustness against two types of adversarial attacks, with a performance decrease of only about a third compared to the default models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19766v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19766v1.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":"towards-robust-extractive-question-answering","repo_url":"https://github.com/sonqt/robust_qa","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"extractive-question-answering","task_name":"Extractive Question-Answering"},{"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}