ConTinTin: Continual Learning from Task Instructions
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08512v1
- Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2022 10:27:18 GMT
- Title: ConTinTin: Continual Learning from Task Instructions
- Authors: Wenpeng Yin, Jia Li, Caiming Xiong
- Abstract summary: This work defines a new learning paradigm ConTinTin, in which a system should learn a sequence of new tasks one by one, each task is explained by a piece of textual instruction.
To our knowledge, this is the first time to study ConTinTin in NLP.
- Score: 101.36836925135091
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: The mainstream machine learning paradigms for NLP often work with two
underlying presumptions. First, the target task is predefined and static, a
system just needs to learn to solve it exclusively. Second, the supervision of
a task mainly comes from a set of labeled examples. A question arises: how to
build a system that can keep learning new tasks from their instructions? This
work defines a new learning paradigm ConTinTin (Continual Learning from Task
Instructions), in which a system should learn a sequence of new tasks one by
one, each task is explained by a piece of textual instruction. The system is
required to (i) generate the expected outputs of a new task by learning from
its instruction, (ii) transfer the knowledge acquired from upstream tasks to
help solve downstream tasks (i.e, forward-transfer), and (iii) retain or even
improve the performance on earlier tasks after learning new tasks (i.e.,
backward-transfer). This new problem is studied on a stream of more than 60
tasks, each equipped with an instruction. Technically, our method
InstructionSpeak contains two strategies that make full use of task
instructions to improve forward-transfer and backward-transfer: one is to learn
from the negative output, the other is to re-visit instructions of prior tasks.
To our knowledge, this is the first time to study ConTinTin in NLP. In addition
to the problem formulation and our promising approach, this work also
contributes to providing rich analyses for the community to better understand
this novel learning problem.
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