Eyal Ben‐David

Alon Jacovi, Moran Ambar, Eyal Ben-David et al. · deepmind

There is a growing line of research on verifying the correctness of language models' outputs. At the same time, LMs are being used to tackle complex queries that require reasoning. We introduce CoverBench, a challenging benchmark focused on verifying LM outputs in complex reasoning settings. Datasets that can be used for this purpose are often designed for other complex reasoning tasks (e.g., QA) targeting specific use-cases (e.g., financial tables), requiring transformations, negative sampling and selection of hard examples to collect such a benchmark. CoverBench provides a diversified evaluation for complex claim verification in a variety of domains, types of reasoning, relatively long inputs, and a variety of standardizations, such as multiple representations for tables where available, and a consistent schema. We manually vet the data for quality to ensure low levels of label noise. Finally, we report a variety of competitive baseline results to show CoverBench is challenging and has very significant headroom. The data is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/coverbench .

Tomer Volk, Eyal Ben-David, Ohad Amosy et al. · nvidia

As Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms continually achieve new milestones, out-of-distribution generalization remains a significant challenge. This paper addresses the issue of multi-source adaptation for unfamiliar domains: We leverage labeled data from multiple source domains to generalize to unknown target domains at training. Our innovative framework employs example-based Hypernetwork adaptation: a T5 encoder-decoder initially generates a unique signature from an input example, embedding it within the source domains' semantic space. This signature is subsequently utilized by a Hypernetwork to generate the task classifier's weights. We evaluated our method across two tasks - sentiment classification and natural language inference - in 29 adaptation scenarios, where it outpaced established algorithms. In an advanced version, the signature also enriches the input example's representation. We also compare our finetuned architecture to few-shot GPT-3, demonstrating its effectiveness in essential use cases. To our knowledge, this marks the first application of Hypernetworks to the adaptation for unknown domains.

Mor Ventura, Eyal Ben-David, Anna Korhonen et al.

Text-To-Image (TTI) models, such as DALL-E and StableDiffusion, have demonstrated remarkable prompt-based image generation capabilities. Multilingual encoders may have a substantial impact on the cultural agency of these models, as language is a conduit of culture. In this study, we explore the cultural perception embedded in TTI models by characterizing culture across three hierarchical tiers: cultural dimensions, cultural domains, and cultural concepts. Based on this ontology, we derive prompt templates to unlock the cultural knowledge in TTI models, and propose a comprehensive suite of evaluation techniques, including intrinsic evaluations using the CLIP space, extrinsic evaluations with a Visual-Question-Answer (VQA) model and human assessments, to evaluate the cultural content of TTI-generated images. To bolster our research, we introduce the CulText2I dataset, derived from six diverse TTI models and spanning ten languages. Our experiments provide insights regarding Do, What, Which and How research questions about the nature of cultural encoding in TTI models, paving the way for cross-cultural applications of these models.

Omer Antverg, Eyal Ben-David, Yonatan Belinkov

Large pre-trained models are usually fine-tuned on downstream task data, and tested on unseen data. When the train and test data come from different domains, the model is likely to struggle, as it is not adapted to the test domain. We propose a new approach for domain adaptation (DA), using neuron-level interventions: We modify the representation of each test example in specific neurons, resulting in a counterfactual example from the source domain, which the model is more familiar with. The modified example is then fed back into the model. While most other DA methods are applied during training time, ours is applied during inference only, making it more efficient and applicable. Our experiments show that our method improves performance on unseen domains.

Aileen Cheng, Alon Jacovi, Amir Globerson et al.

We introduce The FACTS Leaderboard, an online leaderboard suite and associated set of benchmarks that comprehensively evaluates the ability of language models to generate factually accurate text across diverse scenarios. The suite provides a holistic measure of factuality by aggregating the performance of models on four distinct sub-leaderboards: (1) FACTS Multimodal, which measures the factuality of responses to image-based questions; (2) FACTS Parametric, which assesses models' world knowledge by answering closed-book factoid questions from internal parameters; (3) FACTS Search, which evaluates factuality in information-seeking scenarios, where the model must use a search API; and (4) FACTS Grounding (v2), which evaluates whether long-form responses are grounded in provided documents, featuring significantly improved judge models. Each sub-leaderboard employs automated judge models to score model responses, and the final suite score is an average of the four components, designed to provide a robust and balanced assessment of a model's overall factuality. The FACTS Leaderboard Suite will be actively maintained, containing both public and private splits to allow for external participation while guarding its integrity. It can be found at https://www.kaggle.com/benchmarks/google/facts .

Eyal Ben-David, Yftah Ziser, Roi Reichart

Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are rapidly improving but often struggle when applied to out-of-distribution examples. A prominent approach to mitigate the domain gap is domain adaptation, where a model trained on a source domain is adapted to a new target domain. We present a new learning setup, ``domain adaptation from scratch'', which we believe to be crucial for extending the reach of NLP to sensitive domains in a privacy-preserving manner. In this setup, we aim to efficiently annotate data from a set of source domains such that the trained model performs well on a sensitive target domain from which data is unavailable for annotation. Our study compares several approaches for this challenging setup, ranging from data selection and domain adaptation algorithms to active learning paradigms, on two NLP tasks: sentiment analysis and Named Entity Recognition. Our results suggest that using the abovementioned approaches eases the domain gap, and combining them further improves the results.

Ohad Amosy, Tomer Volk, Eilam Shapira et al.

We address the challenge of building task-agnostic classifiers using only text descriptions, demonstrating a unified approach to image classification, 3D point cloud classification, and action recognition from scenes. Unlike approaches that learn a fixed representation of the output classes, we generate at inference time a model tailored to a query classification task. To generate task-based zero-shot classifiers, we train a hypernetwork that receives class descriptions and outputs a multi-class model. The hypernetwork is designed to be equivariant with respect to the set of descriptions and the classification layer, thus obeying the symmetries of the problem and improving generalization. Our approach generates non-linear classifiers, handles rich textual descriptions, and may be adapted to produce lightweight models efficient enough for on-device applications. We evaluate this approach in a series of zero-shot classification tasks, for image, point-cloud, and action recognition, using a range of text descriptions: From single words to rich descriptions. Our results demonstrate strong improvements over previous approaches, showing that zero-shot learning can be applied with little training data. Furthermore, we conduct an analysis with foundational vision and language models, demonstrating that they struggle to generalize when describing what attributes the class lacks.

Nitay Calderon, Eyal Ben-David, Zorik Gekhman et al.

Standard factuality evaluations of LLMs treat all errors alike, obscuring whether failures arise from missing knowledge (empty shelves) or from limited access to encoded facts (lost keys). We propose a behavioral framework that profiles factual knowledge at the level of facts rather than questions, characterizing each fact by whether it is encoded, and then by how accessible it is: cannot be recalled, can be directly recalled, or can only be recalled with inference-time computation (thinking). To support such profiling, we introduce WikiProfile, a new benchmark constructed via an automated pipeline with a prompted LLM grounded in web search. Across 4 million responses from 13 LLMs, we find that encoding is nearly saturated in frontier models on our benchmark, with GPT-5 and Gemini-3 encoding 95--98% of facts. However, recall remains a major bottleneck: many errors previously attributed to missing knowledge instead stem from failures to access it. These failures are systematic and disproportionately affect long-tail facts and reverse questions. Finally, we show that thinking improves recall and can recover a substantial fraction of failures, indicating that future gains may rely less on scaling and more on methods that improve how models utilize what they already encode.

Nitay Calderon, Naveh Porat, Eyal Ben-David et al.

Existing research on Domain Robustness (DR) suffers from disparate setups, limited task variety, and scarce research on recent capabilities such as in-context learning. Furthermore, the common practice of measuring DR might not be fully accurate. Current research focuses on challenge sets and relies solely on the Source Drop (SD): Using the source in-domain performance as a reference point for degradation. However, we argue that the Target Drop (TD), which measures degradation from the target in-domain performance, should be used as a complementary point of view. To address these issues, we first curated a DR benchmark comprised of 7 diverse NLP tasks, which enabled us to measure both the SD and the TD. We then conducted a comprehensive large-scale DR study involving over 14,000 domain shifts across 21 fine-tuned models and few-shot LLMs. We found that both model types suffer from drops upon domain shifts. While fine-tuned models excel in-domain, few-shot LLMs often surpass them cross-domain, showing better robustness. In addition, we found that a large SD can often be explained by shifting to a harder domain rather than by a genuine DR challenge, and this highlights the importance of TD as a complementary metric. We hope our study will shed light on the current DR state of NLP models and promote improved evaluation practices toward more robust models.

Nitay Calderon, Eyal Ben-David, Amir Feder et al.

Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms have become very successful, but they still struggle when applied to out-of-distribution examples. In this paper we propose a controllable generation approach in order to deal with this domain adaptation (DA) challenge. Given an input text example, our DoCoGen algorithm generates a domain-counterfactual textual example (D-con) - that is similar to the original in all aspects, including the task label, but its domain is changed to a desired one. Importantly, DoCoGen is trained using only unlabeled examples from multiple domains - no NLP task labels or parallel pairs of textual examples and their domain-counterfactuals are required. We show that DoCoGen can generate coherent counterfactuals consisting of multiple sentences. We use the D-cons generated by DoCoGen to augment a sentiment classifier and a multi-label intent classifier in 20 and 78 DA setups, respectively, where source-domain labeled data is scarce. Our model outperforms strong baselines and improves the accuracy of a state-of-the-art unsupervised DA algorithm.

Eyal Ben-David, Boaz Carmeli, Ateret Anaby-Tavor

Goal oriented dialogue systems have become a prominent customer-care interaction channel for most businesses. However, not all interactions are smooth, and customer intent misunderstanding is a major cause of dialogue failure. We show that intent prediction can be improved by training a deep text-to-text neural model to generate successive user utterances from unlabeled dialogue data. For that, we define a multi-task training regime that utilizes successive user-utterance generation to improve the intent prediction. Our approach achieves the reported improvement due to two complementary factors: First, it uses a large amount of unlabeled dialogue data for an auxiliary generation task. Second, it uses the generated user utterance as an additional signal for the intent prediction model. Lastly, we present a novel look-ahead approach that uses user utterance generation to improve intent prediction in inference time. Specifically, we generate counterfactual successive user utterances for conversations with ambiguous predicted intents, and disambiguate the prediction by reassessing the concatenated sequence of available and generated utterances.

Eyal Ben-David, Nadav Oved, Roi Reichart

Natural Language Processing algorithms have made incredible progress, but they still struggle when applied to out-of-distribution examples. We address a challenging and underexplored version of this domain adaptation problem, where an algorithm is trained on several source domains, and then applied to examples from unseen domains that are unknown at training time. Particularly, no examples, labeled or unlabeled, or any other knowledge about the target domain are available to the algorithm at training time. We present PADA: An example-based autoregressive Prompt learning algorithm for on-the-fly Any-Domain Adaptation, based on the T5 language model. Given a test example, PADA first generates a unique prompt for it and then, conditioned on this prompt, labels the example with respect to the NLP prediction task. PADA is trained to generate a prompt which is a token sequence of unrestricted length, consisting of Domain Related Features (DRFs) that characterize each of the source domains. Intuitively, the generated prompt is a unique signature that maps the test example to a semantic space spanned by the source domains. In experiments with 3 tasks (text classification and sequence tagging), for a total of 14 multi-source adaptation scenarios, PADA substantially outperforms strong baselines.

Eyal Ben-David, Orgad Keller, Eric Malmi et al.

Sentence fusion is the task of joining related sentences into coherent text. Current training and evaluation schemes for this task are based on single reference ground-truths and do not account for valid fusion variants. We show that this hinders models from robustly capturing the semantic relationship between input sentences. To alleviate this, we present an approach in which ground-truth solutions are automatically expanded into multiple references via curated equivalence classes of connective phrases. We apply this method to a large-scale dataset and use the augmented dataset for both model training and evaluation. To improve the learning of semantic representation using multiple references, we enrich the model with auxiliary discourse classification tasks under a multi-tasking framework. Our experiments highlight the improvements of our approach over state-of-the-art models.

Eyal Ben-David, Carmel Rabinovitz, Roi Reichart

Pivot-based neural representation models have lead to significant progress in domain adaptation for NLP. However, previous works that follow this approach utilize only labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the source and target domains, but neglect to incorporate massive unlabeled corpora that are not necessarily drawn from these domains. To alleviate this, we propose PERL: A representation learning model that extends contextualized word embedding models such as BERT with pivot-based fine-tuning. PERL outperforms strong baselines across 22 sentiment classification domain adaptation setups, improves in-domain model performance, yields effective reduced-size models and increases model stability.