As the application space of language models continues to evolve, a natural question to ask is how we can quickly adapt models to new tasks. We approach this classic question from a continual learning perspective, in which we aim to continue fine-tuning models trained on past tasks on new tasks, with the goal of "transferring" relevant knowledge. However, this strategy also runs the risk of doing more harm than good, i.e., negative transfer. In this paper, we construct a new benchmark of task sequences that target different possible transfer scenarios one might face, such as a sequence of tasks with high potential of positive transfer, high potential for negative transfer, no expected effect, or a mixture of each. An ideal learner should be able to maximally exploit information from all tasks that have any potential for positive transfer, while also avoiding the negative effects of any distracting tasks that may confuse it. We then propose a simple, yet effective, learner that satisfies many of our desiderata simply by leveraging a selective strategy for initializing new models from past task checkpoints. Still, limitations remain, and we hope this benchmark can help the community to further build and analyze such learners.

本文提出了一种针对任务序列的基准测试，旨在从持续学习和迁移学习的角度探讨如何快速适应新任务和模型微调策略。同时，提出了一种简单而有效的学习器，通过选择性策略初始化新模型并从过去的任务检查点中获得最大利用信息的能力。

迈向稳健高效的持续语言学习