FuseGen: PLM Fusion for Data-generation based Zero-shot Learning

Tianyuan Zou, Yang Liu, Peng Li, Jianqing Zhang, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang


Abstract
Data-generation based zero-shot learning, although effective in training Small Task-specific Models (STMs) via synthetic datasets generated by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), is often limited by the low quality of such synthetic datasets. Previous solutions have primarily focused on single PLM settings, where synthetic datasets are typically restricted to specific sub-spaces and often deviate from real-world distributions, leading to severe distribution bias. To mitigate such bias, we propose FuseGen, a novel data-generation based zero-shot learning framework that introduces a new criteria for subset selection from synthetic datasets via utilizing multiple PLMs and trained STMs. The chosen subset provides in-context feedback to each PLM, enhancing dataset quality through iterative data generation. Trained STMs are then used for sample re-weighting as well, further improving data quality. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that FuseGen substantially outperforms existing methods, highly effective in boosting STM performance in a PLM-agnostic way. The code is available at https://github.com/LindaLydia/FuseGen.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.130
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2172–2190
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.130
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianyuan Zou, Yang Liu, Peng Li, Jianqing Zhang, Jingjing Liu, and Ya-Qin Zhang. 2024. FuseGen: PLM Fusion for Data-generation based Zero-shot Learning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2172–2190, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FuseGen: PLM Fusion for Data-generation based Zero-shot Learning (Zou et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.130.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.130.software.zip