ExT5: Towards Extreme Multi-Task Scaling for Transfer Learning
Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Transfer Learning, Multi-task Learning
Abstract: Despite the recent success of multi-task learning and transfer learning for natural language processing (NLP), few works have systematically studied the effect of scaling up the number of tasks during pre-training. Towards this goal, this paper introduces ExMix (Extreme Mixture): a massive collection of 107 supervised NLP tasks across diverse domains and task-families. Using ExMix, we study the effect of multi-task pre-training at the largest scale to date, and analyze co-training transfer amongst common families of tasks. Through this analysis, we show that manually curating an ideal set of tasks for multi-task pre-training is not straightforward, and that multi-task scaling can vastly improve models on its own. Finally, we propose ExT5: a model pre-trained using a multi-task objective of self-supervised span denoising and supervised ExMix. Via extensive experiments, we show that ExT5 outperforms strong T5 baselines on SuperGLUE, GEM, Rainbow, Closed-Book QA tasks, and several tasks outside of ExMix. ExT5 also significantly improves sample efficiency while pre-training.
One-sentence Summary: Using a suite of 107 NLP tasks, we show that massively multi-task pre-training can improve downstream performance on NLP tasks, overcoming trends of negative transfer between tasks while fine-tuning.
Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2111.10952/code)
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