Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are the cornerstone of the modern Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, as PLMs become heavier, fine tuning all their parameters loses their efficiency. Existing parameter-efficient methods generally focus on reducing the trainable parameters in PLMs but neglect the inference speed, which limits the ability to deploy PLMs. In this paper, we propose LayerConnect (hypernetwork-assisted inter-layer connectors) to enhance inference efficiency. Specifically, a light-weight connector with a linear structure is inserted between two Transformer layers, and the parameters inside each connector are tuned by a hypernetwork comprising an interpolator and a down-sampler. We perform extensive experiments on the widely used the GLUE benchmark. The experimental results verify the inference efficiency of our model. Compared to Adapter, our model parameters are reduced to approximately 11.75%, while the performance degradation is kept to less than 5% (2.5 points on average).

Considering the importance of building a good Visual Dialog (VD) Questioner, many researchers study the topic under a Q-Bot-A-Bot image-guessing game setting, where the Questioner needs to raise a series of questions to collect information of an undisclosed image. Despite progress has been made in Supervised Learning (SL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), issues still exist. Firstly, previous methods do not provide explicit and effective guidance for Questioner to generate visually related and informative questions. Secondly, the effect of RL is hampered by an incompetent component, i.e., the Guesser, who makes image predictions based on the generated dialogs and assigns rewards accordingly. To enhance VD Questioner: 1) we propose a Related entity enhanced Questioner (ReeQ) that generates questions under the guidance of related entities and learns entity-based questioning strategy from human dialogs; 2) we propose an Augmented Guesser that is strong and is optimized for VD especially. Experimental results on the VisDial v1.0 dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image-guessing task and question diversity. Human study further verifies that our model generates more visually related, informative and coherent questions.