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Main Authors: Diera, Andor, Galke, Lukas, Karl, Fabian, Scherp, Ansgar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08528
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author Diera, Andor
Galke, Lukas
Karl, Fabian
Scherp, Ansgar
author_facet Diera, Andor
Galke, Lukas
Karl, Fabian
Scherp, Ansgar
contents Continual learning remains a challenge across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, as models updated with new training data often risk catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. We introduce a discrete key-value bottleneck (DKVB) for encoder-only language models, enabling efficient continual learning through localized updates. Inspired by a discrete key-value bottleneck in vision, we consider new and NLP-specific challenges. We compare different bottleneck architectures for NLP and introduce a new, task-independent initialization technique for the discrete keys. We evaluate our DKVB for NLP in four continual learning scenarios and show that it alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to popular continual learning methods while incurring lower computational costs. Furthermore, we show that DKVB remains effective even in challenging single-head continual learning scenarios where no task ID is provided.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08528
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Continual Learning for Small Language Models with a Discrete Key-Value Bottleneck
Diera, Andor
Galke, Lukas
Karl, Fabian
Scherp, Ansgar
Computation and Language
Continual learning remains a challenge across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, as models updated with new training data often risk catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. We introduce a discrete key-value bottleneck (DKVB) for encoder-only language models, enabling efficient continual learning through localized updates. Inspired by a discrete key-value bottleneck in vision, we consider new and NLP-specific challenges. We compare different bottleneck architectures for NLP and introduce a new, task-independent initialization technique for the discrete keys. We evaluate our DKVB for NLP in four continual learning scenarios and show that it alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to popular continual learning methods while incurring lower computational costs. Furthermore, we show that DKVB remains effective even in challenging single-head continual learning scenarios where no task ID is provided.
title Efficient Continual Learning for Small Language Models with a Discrete Key-Value Bottleneck
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08528