Continual Learning for Natural Language Generations with Transformer Calibration

Peng Yang, Dingcheng Li, Ping Li


Abstract
Conventional natural language process (NLP) generation models are trained offline with a given dataset for a particular task, which is referred to as isolated learning. Research on sequence-to-sequence language generation aims to study continual learning model to constantly learning from sequentially encountered tasks. However, continual learning studies often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, a persistent challenge for lifelong learning. In this paper, we present a novel NLP transformer model that attempts to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in online continual learning from a new perspective, i.e., attention calibration. We model the attention in the transformer as a calibrated unit in a general formulation, where the attention calibration could give benefits to balance the stability and plasticity of continual learning algorithms through influencing both their forward inference path and backward optimization path. Our empirical experiments, paraphrase generation and dialog response generation, demonstrate that this work outperforms state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin and effectively mitigate the forgetting.
Anthology ID:
2022.conll-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Antske Fokkens, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
40–49
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.conll-1.4
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.conll-1.4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peng Yang, Dingcheng Li, and Ping Li. 2022. Continual Learning for Natural Language Generations with Transformer Calibration. In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 40–49, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Continual Learning for Natural Language Generations with Transformer Calibration (Yang et al., CoNLL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.conll-1.4.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.conll-1.4.mp4