Domain Adversarial Fine-Tuning as an Effective Regularizer

Giorgos Vernikos, Katerina Margatina, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Ion Androutsopoulos


Abstract
In Natural Language Processing (NLP), pretrained language models (LMs) that are transferred to downstream tasks have been recently shown to achieve state-of-the-art results. However, standard fine-tuning can degrade the general-domain representations captured during pretraining. To address this issue, we introduce a new regularization technique, AFTER; domain Adversarial Fine-Tuning as an Effective Regularizer. Specifically, we complement the task-specific loss used during fine-tuning with an adversarial objective. This additional loss term is related to an adversarial classifier, that aims to discriminate between in-domain and out-of-domain text representations. Indomain refers to the labeled dataset of the task at hand while out-of-domain refers to unlabeled data from a different domain. Intuitively, the adversarial classifier acts as a regularize which prevents the model from overfitting to the task-specific domain. Empirical results on various natural language understanding tasks show that AFTER leads to improved performance compared to standard fine-tuning.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.278
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3103–3112
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.278
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.278
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giorgos Vernikos, Katerina Margatina, Alexandra Chronopoulou, and Ion Androutsopoulos. 2020. Domain Adversarial Fine-Tuning as an Effective Regularizer. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 3103–3112, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Domain Adversarial Fine-Tuning as an Effective Regularizer (Vernikos et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.278.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38940129
Code
 GeorgeVern/AFTERV1.0
Data
AG NewsCoLAGLUEMRPCSSTSST-2