Let the Model Decide its Curriculum for Multitask Learning

Neeraj Varshney, Swaroop Mishra, Chitta Baral


Abstract
Curriculum learning strategies in prior multitask learning approaches arrange datasets in a difficulty hierarchy either based on human perception or by exhaustively searching the optimal arrangement. However, human perception of difficulty may not always correlate well with machine interpretation leading to poor performance and exhaustive search is computationally expensive. Addressing these concerns, we propose two classes of techniques to arrange training instances into a learning curriculum based on difficulty scores computed via model-based approaches. The two classes i.e Dataset-level and Instance-level differ in granularity of arrangement. Through comprehensive experiments with 12 datasets, we show that instance-level and dataset-level techniques result in strong representations as they lead to an average performance improvement of 4.17% and 3.15% over their respective baselines. Furthermore, we find that most of this improvement comes from correctly answering the difficult instances, implying a greater efficacy of our techniques on difficult tasks
Anthology ID:
2022.deeplo-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Hybrid
Editors:
Colin Cherry, Angela Fan, George Foster, Gholamreza (Reza) Haffari, Shahram Khadivi, Nanyun (Violet) Peng, Xiang Ren, Ehsan Shareghi, Swabha Swayamdipta
Venue:
DeepLo
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
117–125
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.deeplo-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.deeplo-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neeraj Varshney, Swaroop Mishra, and Chitta Baral. 2022. Let the Model Decide its Curriculum for Multitask Learning. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing, pages 117–125, Hybrid. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Let the Model Decide its Curriculum for Multitask Learning (Varshney et al., DeepLo 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.deeplo-1.13.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.deeplo-1.13.mp4
Data
GLUEMRPCMultiNLIPAWSQNLISNLIWinoGrande