In this paper, we focus on the challenging yet practical problem of Continual Few-shot Relation Extraction (CFRE), which involves extracting relations in the continuous and iterative arrival of new data with only a few labeled examples. The main challenges in CFRE are overfitting due to few-shot learning and catastrophic forgetting caused by continual learning. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework called RK2DA, which seamlessly integrates prototype-based data augmentation and relational knowledge distillation. Specifically, RK2DA generates pseudo data by introducing Gaussian noise to the prototype embeddings and utilizes a novel two-phase multi-teacher relational knowledge distillation method to transfer various knowledge from different embedding spaces. Experimental results on the FewRel and TACRED datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers turning wrong, which we define as the Toxic CoT problem. To interpret and mitigate this problem, we first utilize attribution tracing and causal tracing methods to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM during CoT reasoning. Through comparisons, we prove that the model exhibits information loss from the question over the shallow attention layers when generating rationales or answers. Based on the probing findings, we design a novel method called RIDERS (Residual decodIng and sERial-position Swap), which compensates for the information deficit in the model from both decoding and serial-position perspectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we validate that this method not only significantly eliminates Toxic CoT problems (decreased by 23.6%), but also effectively improves the model’s overall commonsense reasoning performance (increased by 5.5%).

Adjusting the outdated behaviors of large langugae models (LLMs) after deployment remains a significant challenge. It motivates the model editing research, which is however mainly explored in a restricted task form with triple-based edit requests. Recent works have initiated a transition to a more practical and unified editing task that takes free-form text as edit requests. However, there are gaps in nuanced benchmark designs and re-evaluation of existing methods. To bridge the gaps, we introduce a multi-level benchmark for free text model editing (MULFE). The benchmark categorizes probe queries into three levels of generalization, ranging from basic literal memory to deeper understanding and reasoning. Based on the benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments across various base models, edit sizes, and editing methods, including adaptations of mainstream locate-and-edit and hypernetwork methods. The results highlight the inconsistent behaviors of edited models on different generalization levels. Higher-level generalization remains a significant challenge. Based on the findings, we propose SIDE, a simple yet effective method based on in-context distillation to enhance the generalization performance. The benchmark dataset and evaluation scripts are publicly available at http://github.com/wchrepo/mulfe.

Joint entity and relation extraction aims to extract relation triplets from plain text directly. Prior work leverages Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) models for triplet sequence generation. However, Seq2Seq enforces an unnecessary order on the unordered triplets and involves a large decoding length associated with error accumulation. These methods introduce exposure bias, which may cause the models overfit to the frequent label combination, thus limiting the generalization ability. We propose a novel Sequence-to-Unordered-Multi-Tree (Seq2UMTree) model to minimize the effects of exposure bias by limiting the decoding length to three within a triplet and removing the order among triplets. We evaluate our model on two datasets, DuIE and NYT, and systematically study how exposure bias alters the performance of Seq2Seq models. Experiments show that the state-of-the-art Seq2Seq model overfits to both datasets while Seq2UMTree shows significantly better generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/WindChimeRan/OpenJERE.

The multiple relation extraction task tries to extract all relational facts from a sentence. Existing works didn’t consider the extraction order of relational facts in a sentence. In this paper we argue that the extraction order is important in this task. To take the extraction order into consideration, we apply the reinforcement learning into a sequence-to-sequence model. The proposed model could generate relational facts freely. Widely conducted experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

The relational facts in sentences are often complicated. Different relational triplets may have overlaps in a sentence. We divided the sentences into three types according to triplet overlap degree, including Normal, EntityPairOverlap and SingleEntiyOverlap. Existing methods mainly focus on Normal class and fail to extract relational triplets precisely. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end model based on sequence-to-sequence learning with copy mechanism, which can jointly extract relational facts from sentences of any of these classes. We adopt two different strategies in decoding process: employing only one united decoder or applying multiple separated decoders. We test our models in two public datasets and our model outperform the baseline method significantly.