Improving In-Context Few-Shot Learning via Self-Supervised Training

Mingda Chen, Jingfei Du, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Todor Mihaylov, Srini Iyer, Veselin Stoyanov, Zornitsa Kozareva


Abstract
Self-supervised pretraining has made few-shot learning possible for many NLP tasks. But the pretraining objectives are not typically adapted specifically for in-context few-shot learning. In this paper, we propose to use self-supervision in an intermediate training stage between pretraining and downstream few-shot usage with the goal to teach the model to perform in-context few shot learning. We propose and evaluate four self-supervised objectives on two benchmarks. We find that the intermediate self-supervision stage produces models that outperform strong baselines. Ablation study shows that several factors affect the downstream performance, such as the amount of training data and the diversity of the self-supervised objectives. Human-annotated cross-task supervision and self-supervision are complementary. Qualitative analysis suggests that the self-supervised-trained models are better at following task requirements.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.260
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3558–3573
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.260
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.260
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mingda Chen, Jingfei Du, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Todor Mihaylov, Srini Iyer, Veselin Stoyanov, and Zornitsa Kozareva. 2022. Improving In-Context Few-Shot Learning via Self-Supervised Training. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3558–3573, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving In-Context Few-Shot Learning via Self-Supervised Training (Chen et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.260.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.260.mp4
Data
BoolQCOPAMultiRCNatural InstructionsSuperGLUE