Reminding the incremental language model via data-free self-distillation

Incremental language learning, which involves retrieving pseudo-data from previous tasks, can alleviate catastrophic forgetting. However, previous methods require a large amount of pseudo-data to approach the performance of multitask learning, and the performance decreases dramatically when there is significantly less pseudo-data than new task data. This decrease occurs because the pseudo-data are learned inefficiently and deviate from the real data. To address these issues, we propose reminding the incremental language model via data-free self-distillation (DFSD), which includes 1) self-distillation based on the Earth mover’s distance (SD-EMD) and 2) hidden data augmentation (HDA). SD-EMD can increase the efficiency of the model by adaptively estimating the knowledge distribution in all GPT-2 layers and effectively transferring data from the teacher model to the student model via adaptive self-multilayer-to-multilayer mapping. HDA can reduce deviations by decomposing the generation process via data augmentation and bootstrapping. Our experiments on decaNLP and text classification tasks with low pseudo-data sampling ratios reveal that the DFSD model outperforms previous state-of-the-art incremental methods. The advantages of DFSD become more apparent when there is less pseudo-data and larger deviations.