Robust Machine Comprehension Models via Adversarial Training

It is shown that many published models for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (Rajpurkar et al., 2016) lack robustness, suffering an over 50% decrease in F1 score during adversarial evaluation based on the AddSent (Jia and Liang, 2017) algorithm. It has also been shown that retraining models on data generated by AddSent has limited effect on their robustness. We propose a novel alternative adversary-generation algorithm, AddSentDiverse, that significantly increases the variance within the adversarial training data by providing effective examples that punish the model for making certain superficial assumptions. Further, in order to improve robustness to AddSent's semantic perturbations (e.g., antonyms), we jointly improve the model's semantic-relationship learning capabilities in addition to our AddSentDiverse-based adversarial training data augmentation. With these additions, we show that we can make a state-of-the-art model significantly more robust, achieving a 36.5% increase in F1 score under many different types of adversarial evaluation while maintaining performance on the regular SQuAD task.