Exploring the Effectiveness and Consistency of Task Selection in Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning

Pin-Jie Lin, Miaoran Zhang, Marius Mosbach, Dietrich Klakow


Abstract
Identifying beneficial tasks to transfer from is a critical step toward successful intermediate-task transfer learning. In this work, we experiment with 130 source-target task combinations and demonstrate that the transfer performance exhibits severe variance across different source tasks and training seeds, highlighting the crucial role of intermediate-task selection in a broader context. We compare four representative task selection methods in a unified setup, focusing on their effectiveness and consistency. Compared to embedding-free methods and text embeddings, task embeddings constructed from fine-tuned weights can better estimate task transferability by improving task prediction scores from 2.59% to 3.96%. Despite their strong performance, we observe that the task embeddings do not consistently demonstrate superiority for tasks requiring reasoning abilities. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method that measures pairwise token similarity using maximum inner product search, leading to the highest performance in task prediction. Our findings suggest that token-wise similarity is better predictive for predicting transferability compared to averaging weights.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-srw.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Xiyan Fu, Eve Fleisig
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
264–279
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.24
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pin-Jie Lin, Miaoran Zhang, Marius Mosbach, and Dietrich Klakow. 2024. Exploring the Effectiveness and Consistency of Task Selection in Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 264–279, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring the Effectiveness and Consistency of Task Selection in Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning (Lin et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-srw.24.pdf