@inproceedings{agrawal-etal-2025-multilingual,
    title = "Multilingual Continual Learning using Attention Distillation",
    author = "Agrawal, Sanjay  and
      Nayak, Deep  and
      Sembium, Vivek Varadarajan",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Apidianaki, Marianna  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Eugenio, Barbara Di  and
      Schockaert, Steven  and
      Darwish, Kareem  and
      Agarwal, Apoorv",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2025.coling-industry.8/",
    pages = "91--99",
    abstract = "Query-product relevance classification is crucial for e-commerce stores like Amazon, ensuring accurate search results that match customer intent. Using a unified multilingual model across multiple languages/marketplaces tends to yield superior outcomes but also presents challenges, especially in maintaining performance across all languages when the model is updated or expanded to include a new one. To tackle this, we examine a multilingual continual learning (CL) framework focused on relevance classification tasks and address the issue of catastrophic forgetting. We propose a novel continual learning approach called attention distillation, which sequentially adds adapters for each new language and incorporates a fusion layer above language-specific adapters. This fusion layer distills attention scores from the previously trained fusion layer, focusing on the older adapters. Additionally, translating a portion of the new language data into older ones supports backward knowledge transfer. Our method reduces trainable parameters by 80{\%}, enhancing computational efficiency and enabling frequent updates, while achieving a 1-3{\%} ROC-AUC improvement over single marketplace baselines and outperforming SOTA CL methods on proprietary and external datasets."
}