Fei Mi

ADER: Adaptively Distilled Exemplar Replay Towards Continual Learning for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation has received growing attention recently due to the increasing privacy concern. Despite the recent success of neural session-based recommenders, they are typically developed in an offline manner using a static dataset. However, recommendation requires continual adaptation to take into account new and obsolete items and users, and requires “continual learning” in real-life applications. In this case, the recommender is updated continually and periodically with new data that arrives in each update cycle, and the updated model needs to provide recommendations for user activities before the next model update. A major challenge for continual learning with neural models is catastrophic forgetting, in which a continually trained model forgets user preference patterns it has learned before. To deal with this challenge, we propose a method called Adaptively Distilled Exemplar Replay (ADER) by periodically replaying previous training samples (i.e., exemplars) to the current model with an adaptive distillation loss. Experiments are conducted based on the state-of-the-art SASRec model using two widely used datasets to benchmark ADER with several well-known continual learning techniques. We empirically demonstrate that ADER consistently outperforms other baselines, and it even outperforms the method using all historical data at every update cycle. This result reveals that ADER is a promising solution to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting issue towards building more realistic and scalable session-based recommenders.

ACM2022

Slim: Explicit Slot-Intent Mapping With Bert For Joint Multi-Intent Detection And Slot Filling

Fengyu Cai, Boi Faltings, Fei Mi, Wanhao Zhou

Utterance-level intent detection and token-level slot filling are two key tasks for spoken language understanding (SLU) in task-oriented systems. Most existing approaches assume that only a single intent exists in an utterance. However, there are often multiple intents within an utterance in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we propose a multi-intent SLU framework, called SLIM, to jointly learn multi-intent detection and slot filling based on BERT. To fully exploit the existing annotation data and capture the interactions between slots and intents, SLIM introduces an explicit slot-intent classifier to learn the many-to-one mapping between slots and intents. Empirical results on three public multi-intent datasets demonstrate (1) the superior performance of SLIM compared to the current state-of-the-art for SLU with multiple intents and (2) the benefits obtained from the slot-intent classifier.

IEEE2022

Continual Learning for Natural Language Generation in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

Liangwei Chen, Boi Faltings, Fei Mi, Mengjie Zhao

Natural language generation (NLG) is an essential component of task-oriented dialog systems. Despite the recent success of neural approaches for NLG, they are typically developed in an offline manner for particular domains. To better fit real-life applications where new data come in a stream, we study NLG in a “continual learning” setting to expand its knowledge to new domains or functionalities incrementally. The major challenge towards this goal is catastrophic forgetting, meaning that a continually trained model tends to forget the knowledge it has learned before. To this end, we propose a method called ARPER (Adaptively Regularized Prioritized Exemplar Replay) by replaying prioritized historical exemplars, together with an adaptive regularization technique based on Elastic Weight Consolidation. Extensive experiments to continually learn new domains and intents are conducted on MultiWoZ-2.0 to benchmark ARPER with a wide range of techniques. Empirical results demonstrate that ARPER significantly outperforms other methods by effectively mitigating the detrimental catastrophic forgetting issue.

2021

Lifelong Machine Learning with Data Efficiency and Knowledge Retention

Fei Mi

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become de facto tools in many real-life applications to offer a wide range of benefits for individuals and our society. A classic ML model is typically trained with a large-scale static dataset in an offline manner. Therefore, it can not quickly capture new knowledge in non-stationary environments, and it is difficult to maintain long-term memory for knowledge learned earlier. In practice, many ML systems often need to learn new knowledge (e.g., domains, tasks, distributions, etc.) as more data and experiences are collected, which is referred to as a lifelong ML paradigm in this thesis. We focus on two fundamental challenges to achieve lifelong learning. The first challenge is to quickly learn new knowledge with a small number of observations, and we refer to it as data efficiency. The second challenge is to prevent an ML system from forgetting the old knowledge it has previously learned, and we refer to this challenge as knowledge retention. These two capabilities are crucial for applying ML to most practical applications. In this thesis, we study three important applications with these two challenges, including recommendation systems, task-oriented dialog systems, and the image classification task. First, we propose two approaches to improve data efficiency for task-oriented dialog systems. The first proposed approach is based on Meta-learning, aiming to learn a better model parameter initialization from training data. It can quickly reach a good parameter region of new domains or tasks with a small number of labeled data. The second proposal takes a semi-supervised self-training approach to iteratively train a better model using sufficient unlabeled data when only a limited number of labeled data are available. We empirically demonstrate that both approaches effectively improve data efficiency to learn new knowledge. The second self-training method even consistently improves state-of-the-art large-scale pre-trained models. Second, we tackle the knowledge retention challenge to mitigate the detrimental catastrophic forgetting issue when neural networks learn new knowledge sequentially. We formulate and investigate the ``continual learning'' setting for task-oriented dialog systems and recommendation systems. Through extensive empirical evaluation and analysis, we demonstrate the importance of (1) exemplar replay: storing representative historical data and replaying them to the model while learning new knowledge; (2) dynamic regularization: applying a dynamic regularization term to put flexible constraints on not forgetting previously learned knowledge in each model update cycle. Lastly, we conduct several initial attempts to achieve both data efficiency and knowledge retention in a unified framework. In the recommendation scenario, we propose two approaches using different non-parametric memory modules to retain long-term knowledge. More importantly, the two proposed non-parametric predictions computed on top of them help learn and memorize new knowledge in a data-efficient manner. Apart from the recommendation scenario, we propose a probabilistic evaluation protocol in the widely studied image classification domain. It is general and versatile to simulate a wide range of realistic lifelong learning scenarios that require both knowledge retention and data efficiency for studying different techniques. Through experiments, we also demonstrate the benefit

EPFL2021

Self-training Improves Pre-training for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

Fengyu Cai, Boi Faltings, Lingjing Kong, Fei Mi, Wanhao Zhou

As the labeling cost for different modules in task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems is expensive, a major challenge is to train different modules with the least amount of labeled data. Recently, large-scale pre-trained language models, have shown promising results for few-shot learning in ToD. In this paper, we devise a self-training approach to utilize the abundant unlabeled dialog data to further improve state-of-the-art pre-trained models in few-shot learning scenarios for ToD systems. Specifically, we propose a self-training approach that iteratively labels the most confident unlabeled data to train a stronger Student model. Moreover, a new text augmentation technique (GradAug) is proposed to better train the Student by replacing non-crucial tokens using a masked language model. We conduct extensive experiments and present analyses on four downstream tasks in ToD, including intent classification, dialog state tracking, dialog act prediction, and response selection. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed self-training approach consistently improves state-of-the-art pre-trained models (BERT, ToD-BERT) when only a small number of labeled data are available.

ASSOC COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS-ACL2021

Continual Learning for Natural Language Generation in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

Liangwei Chen, Boi Faltings, Fei Mi, Mengjie Zhao

Natural language generation (NLG) is an essential component of task-oriented dialog systems. Despite the recent success of neural approaches for NLG, they are typically developed in an offline manner for particular domains. To better fit real-life applications where new data come in a stream, we study NLG in a "continual learning" setting to expand its knowledge to new domains or functionalities incrementally. The major challenge towards this goal is catastrophic forgetting, meaning that a continually trained model tends to forget the knowledge it has learned before. To this end, we propose a method called ARPER (Adaptively Regularized Prioritized Exemplar Replay) by replaying prioritized historical exemplars, together with an adaptive regularization technique based on ElasticWeight Consolidation. Extensive experiments to continually learn new domains and intents are conducted on MultiWoZ-2.0 to benchmark ARPER with a wide range of techniques. Empirical results demonstrate that ARPER significantly outperforms other methods by effectively mitigating the detrimental catastrophic forgetting issue.

2020

Memory Augmented Neural Model for Incremental Session-based Recommendation

Boi Faltings, Fei Mi

Increasing concerns with privacy have stimulated interests in Session-based Recommendation (SR) using no personal data other than what is observed in the current browser session. Existing methods are evaluated in static settings which rarely occur in real-world applications. To better address the dynamic nature of SR tasks, we study an incremental SR scenario, where new items and preferences appear continuously. We show that existing neural recommenders can be used in incremental SR scenarios with small incremental updates to alleviate computation overhead and catastrophic forgetting. More importantly, we propose a general framework called Memory Augmented Neural model (MAN). MAN augments a base neural recommender with a continuously queried and updated nonparametric memory, and the predictions from the neural and the memory components are combined through another lightweight gating network. We empirically show that MAN is well-suited for the incremental SR task, and it consistently outperforms state-oft-he-art neural and nonparametric methods. We analyze the results and demonstrate that it is particularly good at incrementally learning preferences on new and infrequent items.

2020

Memory Augmented Neural Model for Incremental Session-based Recommendation

Boi Faltings, Fei Mi

Increasing concerns with privacy have stimulated interests in Session-based Recommendation (SR) using no personal data other than what is observed in the current browser session. Existing methods are evaluated in static settings which rarely occur in real-world applications. To better address the dynamic nature of SR tasks, we study an incremental SR scenario, where new items and preferences appear continuously. We show that existing neural recommenders can be used in incremental SR scenarios with small incremental updates to alleviate computation overhead and catastrophic forgetting. More importantly, we propose a general framework called Memory Augmented Neural model (MAN). MAN augments a base neural recommender with a continuously queried and updated nonparametric memory, and the predictions from the neural and the memory components are combined through another lightweight gating network. We empirically show that MAN is well-suited for the incremental SR task, and it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art neural and nonparametric methods. We analyze the results and demonstrate that it is particularly good at incrementally learning preferences on new and infrequent items.

2020

Adaptive Sequential Recommendation for Discussion Forums on MOOCs using Context Trees

Boi Faltings, Fei Mi

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have demonstrated growing popularity and rapid development in recent years. Discussion forums have become crucial components for students and instructors to widely exchange ideas and propagate knowledge. It is important to recommend helpful information from forums to students for the benefit of the learning process. However, students or instructors update discussion forums very often, and the student preferences over forum contents shift rapidly as a MOOC progresses. So, MOOC forum recommendations need to be adaptive to these evolving forum contents and drifting student interests. These frequent changes pose a challenge to most standard recommendation methods as they have difficulty adapting to new and drifting observations. We formalize the discussion forum recommendation problem as a sequence prediction problem. Then we compare different methods, including a new method called context tree (CT), which can be effectively applied to online sequential recommendation tasks. The results show that the CT recommender performs better than other methods for MOOCs forum recommendation task. We analyze the reasons for this and demonstrate that it is because of better adaptation to changes in the domain. This highlights the importance of considering the adaptation aspect when building recommender system with drifting preferences, as well as using machine learning in general.

2017