Illuminating Blind Spots of Language Models with Targeted Agent-in-the-Loop Synthetic Data

Abstract

Language models (LMs) have achieved impressive accuracy across a variety of tasks but remain vulnerable to high-confidence misclassifications, also referred to as unknown unknowns (UUs). These UUs cluster into blind spots in the feature space, leading to significant risks in high-stakes applications. This is particularly relevant for smaller, lightweight LMs that are more susceptible to such errors. While the identification of UUs has been extensively studied, their mitigation remains an open challenge, including how to use identified UUs to eliminate unseen blind spots. In this work, we propose a novel approach to address blind spot mitigation through the use of intelligent agents -- either humans or large LMs -- as teachers to characterize UU-type errors. By leveraging the generalization capabilities of intelligent agents, we identify patterns in high-confidence misclassifications and use them to generate targeted synthetic samples to improve model robustness and reduce blind spots. We conduct an extensive evaluation of our method on three classification tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing the number of UUs, all while maintaining a similar level of accuracy. We find that the effectiveness of human computation has a high ceiling but is highly dependent on familiarity with the underlying task. Moreover, the cost gap between humans and LMs surpasses an order of magnitude, as LMs attain human-like generalization and generation performance while being more scalable.