When is dataset cartography ineffective? Using training dynamics does not improve robustness against Adversarial SQuAD

In this paper, I investigate the effectiveness of dataset cartography for extractive question answering on the SQuAD dataset. I begin by analyzing annotation artifacts in SQuAD and evaluate the impact of two adversarial datasets, AddSent and AddOneSent, on an ELECTRA-small model. Using training dynamics, I partition SQuAD into easy-to-learn, ambiguous, and hard-to-learn subsets. I then compare the performance of models trained on these subsets to those trained on randomly selected samples of equal size. Results show that training on cartography-based subsets does not improve generalization to the SQuAD validation set or the AddSent adversarial set. While the hard-to-learn subset yields a slightly higher F1 score on the AddOneSent dataset, the overall gains are limited. These findings suggest that dataset cartography provides little benefit for adversarial robustness in SQuAD-style QA tasks. I conclude by comparing these results to prior findings on SNLI and discuss possible reasons for the observed differences.

@article{mandal2025_2503.18290,
  title={ When is dataset cartography ineffective? Using training dynamics does not improve robustness against Adversarial SQuAD },
  author={ Paul K. Mandal },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.18290},
  year={ 2025 }
}