Fajie Yuan


2021

pdf bib
Continual Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Iterative Network Pruning, Expanding and Masking
Binzong Geng | Fajie Yuan | Qiancheng Xu | Ying Shen | Ruifeng Xu | Min Yang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

This ability to learn consecutive tasks without forgetting how to perform previously trained problems is essential for developing an online dialogue system. This paper proposes an effective continual learning method for the task-oriented dialogue system with iterative network pruning, expanding, and masking (TPEM), which preserves performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent tasks. Specifically, TPEM (i) leverages network pruning to keep the knowledge for old tasks, (ii) adopts network expanding to create free weights for new tasks, and (iii) introduces task-specific network masking to alleviate the negative impact of fixed weights of old tasks on new tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on seven different tasks from three benchmark datasets and show empirically that TPEM leads to significantly improved results over the strong competitors.

2018

pdf bib
Batch IS NOT Heavy: Learning Word Representations From All Samples
Xin Xin | Fajie Yuan | Xiangnan He | Joemon M. Jose
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with negative sampling is the most prevalent approach to learn word representations. However, it is known that sampling methods are biased especially when the sampling distribution deviates from the true data distribution. Besides, SGD suffers from dramatic fluctuation due to the one-sample learning scheme. In this work, we propose AllVec that uses batch gradient learning to generate word representations from all training samples. Remarkably, the time complexity of AllVec remains at the same level as SGD, being determined by the number of positive samples rather than all samples. We evaluate AllVec on several benchmark tasks. Experiments show that AllVec outperforms sampling-based SGD methods with comparable efficiency, especially for small training corpora.