SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models

Weixiang Zhao, Shilong Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Wanxiang Che


Abstract
The continual learning (CL) ability is vital for deploying large language models (LLMs) in the dynamic world. Existing methods devise the learning module to acquire task-specific knowledge with parameter-efficient tuning (PET) block and the selection module to pick out the corresponding one for the testing input, aiming at handling the challenges of catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer in CL. However, these methods tend to address only one of the challenges, ignoring the potential of aligning the two modules to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer simultaneously. To this end, we propose a novel Shared Attention Framework (SAPT), to align the PET learning and selection via the Shared Attentive Learning & Selection module. Extensive Experiments on two CL benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SAPT. Moreover, SAPT consistently demonstrates its superiority when we scale it to different model sizes (from 770M to 13B), different model architectures (T5 and LLaMA-2) and unseen tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.625
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11641–11661
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.625
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weixiang Zhao, Shilong Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, and Wanxiang Che. 2024. SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11641–11661, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models (Zhao et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.625.pdf