Continuous Risk Prediction
This addresses the problem of practical applicability for QA models in real-world lifelong learning scenarios, representing a domain-specific advancement.
The paper tackles the challenge of adapting lifelong learning methods to question-answering tasks by introducing Diana, a dynamic architecture-based framework that uses hierarchically structured prompts, achieving state-of-the-art performance with notable improvements in handling unseen tasks.
Lifelong learning (LL) capabilities are essential for QA models to excel in real-world applications, and architecture-based LL approaches have proven to be a promising direction for achieving this goal. However, adapting existing methods to QA tasks is far from straightforward. Many prior approaches either rely on access to task identities during testing or fail to adequately model samples from unseen tasks, which limits their practical applicability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Diana , a novel \underline{d}ynam\underline{i}c \underline{a}rchitecture-based lifelo\underline{n}g Q\underline{A} framework designed to learn a sequence of QA tasks using a prompt-enhanced language model.Diana leverages four hierarchically structured types of prompts to capture QA knowledge at multiple levels of granularity. Task-level prompts are specifically designed to encode task-specific knowledge, ensuring strong lifelong learning performance. Meanwhile, instance-level prompts are utilized to capture shared knowledge across diverse input samples, enhancing the model's generalization capabilities. Additionally, Diana incorporates dedicated prompts to explicitly handle unseen tasks and introduces a set of prompt key vectors that facilitate efficient knowledge transfer and sharing between tasks. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Diana achieves state-of-the-art performance among lifelong QA models, with particularly notable improvements in its ability to handle previously unseen tasks. This makes Diana a significant advancement in the field of lifelong learning for question-answering systems.