An empirical study of memorization in NLP
A recent study by Feldman (2020) proposed a long-tail theory to explain the memorization behavior of deep learning models. However, memorization has not been empirically verified in the context of NLP, a gap addressed by this work. In this paper, we use three different NLP tasks to check if the long...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | text |
| Language: | English |
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Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
2022
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| Online Access: | https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7705 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8708/viewcontent/2022.acl_long.434.pdf |
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| Institution: | Singapore Management University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | A recent study by Feldman (2020) proposed a long-tail theory to explain the memorization behavior of deep learning models. However, memorization has not been empirically verified in the context of NLP, a gap addressed by this work. In this paper, we use three different NLP tasks to check if the long-tail theory holds. Our experiments demonstrate that top-ranked memorized training instances are likely atypical, and removing the top-memorized training instances leads to a more serious drop in test accuracy compared with removing training instances randomly. Furthermore, we develop an attribution method to better understand why a training instance is memorized. We empirically show that our memorization attribution method is faithful, and share our interesting finding that the top-memorized parts of a training instance tend to be features negatively correlated with the class label. |
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