@inproceedings{chen-etal-2023-disco,
    title = "{DISCO}: Distilling Counterfactuals with Large Language Models",
    author = "Chen, Zeming  and
      Gao, Qiyue  and
      Bosselut, Antoine  and
      Sabharwal, Ashish  and
      Richardson, Kyle",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.302",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.302",
    pages = "5514--5528",
    abstract = "Models trained with counterfactually augmented data learn representations of the causal structure of tasks, enabling robust generalization. However, high-quality counterfactual data is scarce for most tasks and not easily generated at scale. When crowdsourced, such data is typically limited in scale and diversity; when generated using supervised methods, it is computationally expensive to extend to new counterfactual dimensions. In this work, we introduce DISCO (DIStilled COunterfactual Data), a new method for automatically generating high-quality counterfactual data at scale. DISCO engineers prompts to generate phrasal perturbations with a large general language model. Then, a task-specific teacher model filters these generations to distill high-quality counterfactual data. While task-agnostic, we apply our pipeline to the task of natural language inference (NLI) and find that on challenging evaluations such as the NLI stress test, comparatively smaller student models trained with DISCO generated counterfactuals are more robust (6{\%} absolute) and generalize better across distributions (2{\%}) compared to models trained without data augmentation. Furthermore, DISCO augmented models are 10{\%} more consistent between counterfactual pairs on three evaluation sets, demonstrating that DISCO augmentation enables models to more reliably learn causal representations. Our repository are available at: \url{https://github.com/eric11eca/disco}",
}

Models trained with counterfactually augmented data learn representations of the causal structure of tasks, enabling robust generalization. However, high-quality counterfactual data is scarce for most tasks and not easily generated at scale. When crowdsourced, such data is typically limited in scale and diversity; when generated using supervised methods, it is computationally expensive to extend to new counterfactual dimensions. In this work, we introduce DISCO (DIStilled COunterfactual Data), a new method for automatically generating high-quality counterfactual data at scale. DISCO engineers prompts to generate phrasal perturbations with a large general language model. Then, a task-specific teacher model filters these generations to distill high-quality counterfactual data. While task-agnostic, we apply our pipeline to the task of natural language inference (NLI) and find that on challenging evaluations such as the NLI stress test, comparatively smaller student models trained with DISCO generated counterfactuals are more robust (6{\%} absolute) and generalize better across distributions (2{\%}) compared to models trained without data augmentation. Furthermore, DISCO augmented models are 10{\%} more consistent between counterfactual pairs on three evaluation sets, demonstrating that DISCO augmentation enables models to more reliably learn causal representations. Our repository are available at: \url{https://github.com/eric11eca/disco}
Chen, Zeming Gao, Qiyue Bosselut, Antoine Sabharwal, Ashish Richardson, Kyle
DISCO: Distilling Counterfactuals with Large Language Models