SharpSeq: Empowering Continual Event Detection through Sharpness-Aware Sequential-task Learning
Thanh-Thien Le, Viet Dao, Linh Nguyen, Thi-Nhung Nguyen, Linh Ngo, Thien Nguyen
Abstract
Continual event detection is a cornerstone in uncovering valuable patterns in many dynamic practical applications, where novel events emerge daily. Existing state-of-the-art approaches with replay buffers still suffer from catastrophic forgetting, partially due to overly simplistic objective aggregation. This oversight disregards complex trade-offs and leads to sub-optimal gradient updates, resulting in performance deterioration across objectives. While there are successful, widely cited multi-objective optimization frameworks for multi-task learning, they lack mechanisms to address data imbalance and evaluate whether a Pareto-optimal solution can effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting, rendering them unsuitable for direct application to continual learning. To address these challenges, we propose **SharpSeq**, a novel continual learning paradigm leveraging sharpness-aware minimization combined with a generative model to balance training data distribution. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of SharpSeq in continual event detection, proving the importance of our approach in mitigating catastrophic forgetting in continual event detection.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.naacl-long.200
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3632–3644
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.200
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Thanh-Thien Le, Viet Dao, Linh Nguyen, Thi-Nhung Nguyen, Linh Ngo, and Thien Nguyen. 2024. SharpSeq: Empowering Continual Event Detection through Sharpness-Aware Sequential-task Learning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3632–3644, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- SharpSeq: Empowering Continual Event Detection through Sharpness-Aware Sequential-task Learning (Le et al., NAACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2024.naacl-long.200.pdf