Improved Text Classification via Test-Time Augmentation

Test-time augmentation -- the aggregation of predictions across transformed examples of test inputs -- is an established technique to improve the performance of image classification models. Importantly, TTA can be used to improve model performance post-hoc, without additional training. Although test-time augmentation (TTA) can be applied to any data modality, it has seen limited adoption in NLP due in part to the difficulty of identifying label-preserving transformations. In this paper, we present augmentation policies that yield significant accuracy improvements with language models. A key finding is that augmentation policy design -- for instance, the number of samples generated from a single, non-deterministic augmentation -- has a considerable impact on the benefit of TTA. Experiments across a binary classification task and dataset show that test-time augmentation can deliver consistent improvements over current state-of-the-art approaches.

Helen Lu, Divya Shanmugam, Harini Suresh, John Guttag · 2022