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.

In this paper, we propose a self-distillation framework with meta learning (MetaSD) for knowledge graph completion with dynamic pruning, which aims to learn compressed graph embeddings and tackle the long-tail samples. Specifically, we first propose a dynamic pruning technique to obtain a small pruned model from a large source model, where the pruning mask of the pruned model could be updated adaptively per epoch after the model weights are updated. The pruned model is supposed to be more sensitive to difficult-to-memorize samples (e.g., long-tail samples) than the source model. Then, we propose a one-step meta self-distillation method for distilling comprehensive knowledge from the source model to the pruned model, where the two models co-evolve in a dynamic manner during training. In particular, we exploit the performance of the pruned model, which is trained alongside the source model in one iteration, to improve the source model’s knowledge transfer ability for the next iteration via meta learning. Extensive experiments show that MetaSD achieves competitive performance compared to strong baselines, while being 10x smaller than baselines.