@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2024-ensemble,
    title = "An Ensemble-of-Experts Framework for Rehearsal-free Continual Relation Extraction",
    author = "Zhou, Shen  and
      Li, Yongqi  and
      Miao, Xin  and
      Qian, Tieyun",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2024.findings-acl.83/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.83",
    pages = "1410--1423",
    abstract = "Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continuously learn relations in new tasks without forgetting old relations in previous tasks.Current CRE methods are all rehearsal-based which need to store samples and thus may encounter privacy and security issues.This paper targets rehearsal-free continual relation extraction for the first time and decomposes it into task identification and within-task prediction sub-problems. Existing rehearsal-free methods focus on training a model (expert) for within-task prediction yet neglect to enhance models' capability of task identification.In this paper, we propose an Ensemble-of-Experts (EoE) framework for rehearsal-free continual relation extraction. Specifically, we first discriminatively train each expert by augmenting analogous relations across tasks to enhance the expert`s task identification ability. We then propose a cascade voting mechanism to form an ensemble of experts for effectively aggregating their abilities.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms current rehearsal-free methods and is even better than rehearsal-based CRE methods."
}