2022/12/20 by Orion Weller, Aleem Ahmed Khan, Weller, Orion +7 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Access Control and Trust #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.10002
openalex publication_date 2022/12/20 · openalex created_date 2023/01/04 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent work in open-domain question answering (ODQA) has shown that adversarial poisoning of the search collection can cause large drops in accuracy for production systems. However, little to no work has proposed methods to defend against these attacks. To do so, we rely on the intuition that redundant information often exists in large corpora. To find it, we introduce a method that uses query augmentation to search for a diverse set of passages that could answer the original question but are less likely to have been poisoned. We integrate these new passages into the model through the design of a novel confidence method, comparing the predicted answer to its appearance in the retrieved contexts (what we call Confidence from Answer Redundancy, i.e. CAR). Together these methods allow for a simple but effective way to defend against poisoning attacks that provides gains of nearly 20% exact match across varying levels of data poisoning/knowledge conflicts.