Two Birds One Stone: Dynamic Ensemble for OOD Intent Classification

Out-of-domain (OOD) intent classification is an active field of natural language understanding, which is of great practical significance for intelligent devices such as the Task-Oriented Dialogue System. It mainly contains two challenges: it requires the model to know what it knows and what it does not know. This paper investigates "overthinking" in the openworld scenario and its impact on OOD intent classification. Inspired by this, we propose a two-birds-one-stone method, which allows the model to decide whether to make a decision on OOD classification early during inference and can ensure accuracy and accelerate inference. At the same time, to adapt to the behavior of dynamic inference, we also propose a training method based on ensemble methods. In addition to bringing certain theoretical insights, we also conduct detailed experiments on three real-world intent datasets. Compared with the previous baselines, our method can not only improve inference speed, but also achieve significant performance improvements. Code is publicly available. 1