An Ensemble-of-Experts Framework for Rehearsal-free Continual Relation Extraction

Shen Zhou, Yongqi Li, Xin Miao, Tieyun Qian


Abstract
Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continuously learn relations in new tasks without forgetting old relations in previous tasks.Current CRE methods are all rehearsal-based which need to store samples and thus may encounter privacy and security issues.This paper targets rehearsal-free continual relation extraction for the first time and decomposes it into task identification and within-task prediction sub-problems. Existing rehearsal-free methods focus on training a model (expert) for within-task prediction yet neglect to enhance models’ capability of task identification.In this paper, we propose an Ensemble-of-Experts (EoE) framework for rehearsal-free continual relation extraction. Specifically, we first discriminatively train each expert by augmenting analogous relations across tasks to enhance the expert’s task identification ability. We then propose a cascade voting mechanism to form an ensemble of experts for effectively aggregating their abilities.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms current rehearsal-free methods and is even better than rehearsal-based CRE methods.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.83
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1410–1423
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.83
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shen Zhou, Yongqi Li, Xin Miao, and Tieyun Qian. 2024. An Ensemble-of-Experts Framework for Rehearsal-free Continual Relation Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 1410–1423, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Ensemble-of-Experts Framework for Rehearsal-free Continual Relation Extraction (Zhou et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.83.pdf