PaCE: Unified Multi-modal Dialogue Pre-training with Progressive and Compositional Experts

Yunshui Li, Binyuan Hui, ZhiChao Yin, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li


Abstract
Perceiving multi-modal information and fulfilling dialogues with humans is a long-term goal of artificial intelligence. Pre-training is commonly regarded as an effective approach for multi-modal dialogue. However, due to the limited availability of multi-modal dialogue data, there is still scarce research on multi-modal dialogue pre-training. Yet another intriguing challenge emerges from the encompassing nature of multi-modal dialogue, which involves various modalities and tasks. Moreover, new forms of tasks may arise at unpredictable points in the future. Hence, it is essential for designed multi-modal dialogue models to possess sufficient flexibility to adapt to such scenarios. This paper proposes PaCE, a unified, structured, compositional multi-modal dialogue pre-training framework. It utilizes a combination of several fundamental experts to accommodate multiple dialogue-related tasks and can be pre-trained using limited dialogue and extensive non-dialogue multi-modal data. Furthermore, we propose a progressive training method where old experts from the past can assist new experts, facilitating the expansion of their capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that PaCE achieves state-of-the-art results on eight multi-modal dialog benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.749
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:
13402–13416
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.749
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.749
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yunshui Li, Binyuan Hui, ZhiChao Yin, Min Yang, Fei Huang, and Yongbin Li. 2023. PaCE: Unified Multi-modal Dialogue Pre-training with Progressive and Compositional Experts. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13402–13416, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PaCE: Unified Multi-modal Dialogue Pre-training with Progressive and Compositional Experts (Li et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.749.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.749.mp4