Less Is More: Domain Adaptation with Lottery Ticket for Reading Comprehension

Haichao Zhu, Zekun Wang, Heng Zhang, Ming Liu, Sendong Zhao, Bing Qin


Abstract
In this paper, we propose a simple few-shot domain adaptation paradigm for reading comprehension. We first identify the lottery subnetwork structure within the Transformer-based source domain model via gradual magnitude pruning. Then, we only fine-tune the lottery subnetwork, a small fraction of the whole parameters, on the annotated target domain data for adaptation. To obtain more adaptable subnetworks, we introduce self-attention attribution to weigh parameters, beyond simply pruning the smallest magnitude parameters, which can be seen as combining structured pruning and unstructured magnitude pruning softly. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the full model fine-tuning adaptation on four out of five domains when only a small amount of annotated data available for adaptation. Moreover, introducing self-attention attribution reserves more parameters for important attention heads in the lottery subnetwork and improves the target domain model performance. Our further analyses reveal that, besides exploiting fewer parameters, the choice of subnetworks is critical to the effectiveness.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.95
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1102–1113
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.95
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.95
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haichao Zhu, Zekun Wang, Heng Zhang, Ming Liu, Sendong Zhao, and Bing Qin. 2021. Less Is More: Domain Adaptation with Lottery Ticket for Reading Comprehension. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 1102–1113, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Less Is More: Domain Adaptation with Lottery Ticket for Reading Comprehension (Zhu et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.95.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.95.mp4
Code
 haichao592/alter
Data
MRQANatural QuestionsNewsQAQuACSQuADTriviaQATweetQA