Domain-adaptative Continual Learning for Low-resource Tasks: Evaluation on Nepali

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Duwal, Sharad, Prasai, Suraj, Manandhar, Suresh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Duwal, Sharad
Prasai, Suraj
Manandhar, Suresh
author_facet Duwal, Sharad
Prasai, Suraj
Manandhar, Suresh
contents Continual learning has emerged as an important research direction due to the infeasibility of retraining large language models (LLMs) from scratch in the event of new data availability. Of great interest is the domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT) paradigm, which focuses on continually training a pre-trained language model to adapt it to a domain it was not originally trained on. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of DAPT in a low-resource setting, namely the Nepali language. We use synthetic data to continue training Llama 3 8B to adapt it to the Nepali language in a 4-bit QLoRA setting. We evaluate the adapted model on its performance, forgetting, and knowledge acquisition. We compare the base model and the final model on their Nepali generation abilities, their performance on popular benchmarks, and run case-studies to probe their linguistic knowledge in Nepali. We see some unsurprising forgetting in the final model, but also surprisingly find that increasing the number of shots during evaluation yields better percent increases in the final model (as high as 19.29% increase) compared to the base model (4.98%), suggesting latent retention. We also explore layer-head self-attention heatmaps to establish dependency resolution abilities of the final model in Nepali.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_13860
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Domain-adaptative Continual Learning for Low-resource Tasks: Evaluation on Nepali
Duwal, Sharad
Prasai, Suraj
Manandhar, Suresh
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Continual learning has emerged as an important research direction due to the infeasibility of retraining large language models (LLMs) from scratch in the event of new data availability. Of great interest is the domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT) paradigm, which focuses on continually training a pre-trained language model to adapt it to a domain it was not originally trained on. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of DAPT in a low-resource setting, namely the Nepali language. We use synthetic data to continue training Llama 3 8B to adapt it to the Nepali language in a 4-bit QLoRA setting. We evaluate the adapted model on its performance, forgetting, and knowledge acquisition. We compare the base model and the final model on their Nepali generation abilities, their performance on popular benchmarks, and run case-studies to probe their linguistic knowledge in Nepali. We see some unsurprising forgetting in the final model, but also surprisingly find that increasing the number of shots during evaluation yields better percent increases in the final model (as high as 19.29% increase) compared to the base model (4.98%), suggesting latent retention. We also explore layer-head self-attention heatmaps to establish dependency resolution abilities of the final model in Nepali.
title Domain-adaptative Continual Learning for Low-resource Tasks: Evaluation on Nepali
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13860