Hard Sample Aware Prompt-Tuning

Yuanjian Xu, Qi An, Jiahuan Zhang, Peng Li, Zaiqing Nie


Abstract
Prompt-tuning based few-shot learning has garnered increasing attention in recent years due to its efficiency and promising capability. To achieve the best performance for NLP tasks with just a few samples, it is vital to include as many informative samples as possible and to avoid misleading ones. However, there is no work in prompt-tuning literature addressing the problem of differentiating informative hard samples from misleading ones in model training, which is challenging due to the lack of supervision signals about the quality of the samples to train a well-performed model. We propose a Hard Sample Aware Prompt-Tuning framework (i.e. HardPT) to solve the non-differentiable problem in hard sample identification with reinforcement learning, and to strengthen the discrimination of the feature space without changing the original data distribution via an adaptive contrastive learning method. An extensive empirical study on a series of NLP tasks demonstrates the capability of HardPT in few-shot scenarios. HardPT obtains new SOTA results on all evaluated NLP tasks, including pushing the SST-5 accuracy to 49.5% (1.1% point absolute improvement), QNLI accuracy to 74.6% (1.9% absolute improvement), NMLI accuracy to 71.5 (0.7% absolute improvement), TACREV F1-score to 28.2 (1.0 absolute improvement), and i2b2/VA F1-score to 41.2 (1.3 absolute improvement).
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.690
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:
12356–12369
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.690
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.690
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanjian Xu, Qi An, Jiahuan Zhang, Peng Li, and Zaiqing Nie. 2023. Hard Sample Aware Prompt-Tuning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12356–12369, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hard Sample Aware Prompt-Tuning (Xu et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.690.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.690.mp4