TaSL: Continual Dialog State Tracking via Task Skill Localization and Consolidation

Yujie Feng, Xu Chu, Yongxin Xu, Guangyuan Shi, Bo Liu, Xiao-Ming Wu


Abstract
A practical dialogue system requires the capacity for ongoing skill acquisition and adaptability to new tasks while preserving prior knowledge. However, current methods for Continual Dialogue State Tracking (DST), a crucial function of dialogue systems, struggle with the catastrophic forgetting issue and knowledge transfer between tasks. We present TaSL, a novel framework for task skill localization and consolidation that enables effective knowledge transfer without relying on memory replay. TaSL uses a novel group-wise technique to pinpoint task-specific and task-shared areas. Additionally, a fine-grained skill consolidation strategy protects task-specific knowledge from being forgotten while updating shared knowledge for bi-directional knowledge transfer. As a result, TaSL strikes a balance between preserving previous knowledge and excelling at new tasks. Comprehensive experiments on various backbones highlight the significant performance improvements of TaSL, with a 7.6% absolute increase in Avg. JGA and an 11% absolute rise in BWT metrics over existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is provided for reproducibility.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.69
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1266–1279
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.69
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yujie Feng, Xu Chu, Yongxin Xu, Guangyuan Shi, Bo Liu, and Xiao-Ming Wu. 2024. TaSL: Continual Dialog State Tracking via Task Skill Localization and Consolidation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1266–1279, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TaSL: Continual Dialog State Tracking via Task Skill Localization and Consolidation (Feng et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.69.pdf