Rehearsal-free Continual Language Learning via Efficient Parameter Isolation

Zhicheng Wang, Yufang Liu, Tao Ji, Xiaoling Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Congcong Jiang, Ye Chao, Zhencong Han, Ling Wang, Xu Shao, Wenqiu Zeng


Abstract
We study the problem of defying catastrophic forgetting when learning a series of language processing tasks. Compared with previous methods, we emphasize the importance of not caching history tasks’ data, which makes the problem more challenging. Our proposed method applies the parameter isolation strategy. For each task, it allocates a small portion of private parameters and learns them with a shared pre-trained model. To load correct parameters at testing time, we introduce a simple yet effective non-parametric method. Experiments on continual language learning benchmarks show that our method is significantly better than all existing no-data-cache methods, and is comparable (or even better) than those using historical data.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.612
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10933–10946
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.612
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.612
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhicheng Wang, Yufang Liu, Tao Ji, Xiaoling Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Congcong Jiang, Ye Chao, Zhencong Han, Ling Wang, Xu Shao, and Wenqiu Zeng. 2023. Rehearsal-free Continual Language Learning via Efficient Parameter Isolation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10933–10946, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Rehearsal-free Continual Language Learning via Efficient Parameter Isolation (Wang et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.612.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.612.mp4