What's in Your Head? Emergent Behaviour in Multi-Task Transformer Models

Mor Geva, Uri Katz, Aviv Ben-Arie, Jonathan Berant

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

The primary paradigm for multi-task training in natural language processing is to represent the input with a shared pre-trained language model, and add a small, thin network (head) per task. Given an input, a target head is the head that is selected for outputting the final prediction. In this work, we examine the behaviour of non-target heads, that is, the output of heads when given input that belongs to a different task than the one they were trained for. We find that non-target heads exhibit emergent behaviour, which may either explain the target task, or generalize beyond their original task. For example, in a numerical reasoning task, a span extraction head extracts from the input the arguments to a computation that results in a number generated by a target generative head. In addition, a summarization head that is trained with a target question answering head, outputs query-based summaries when given a question and a context from which the answer is to be extracted. This emergent behaviour suggests that multi-task training leads to nontrivial extrapolation of skills, which can be harnessed for interpretability and generalization.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2021 - 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages8201-8215
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917094
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2021 - Virtual, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Duration: 7 Nov 202111 Nov 2021

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2021 - 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings

Conference

Conference2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2021
Country/TerritoryDominican Republic
CityVirtual, Punta Cana
Period7/11/2111/11/21

Funding

FundersFunder number
European Union Horizons 2020 research and innovation programmeDELPHI 802800
Yandex Initiative for Machine Learning
European Research Council

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