COMM: Concentrated Margin Maximization for Robust Document-Level Relation Extraction

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) is the process of identifying and extracting relations between entities that span multiple sentences within a document. Due to its realistic settings, DocRE has garnered increasing research attention in recent years. Previous research has mostly focused on developing sophisticated encoding models to better capture the intricate patterns between entity pairs. While these advancements are undoubtedly crucial, an even more foundational challenge lies in the data itself. The complexity inherent in DocRE makes the labeling process prone to errors, compounded by the extreme sparsity of positive relation samples, which is driven by both the limited availability of positive instances and the broad diversity of positive relation types. These factors can lead to biased optimization processes, further complicating the task of accurate relation extraction. Recognizing these challenges, we have developed a robust framework called COMM to better solve DocRE. COMM operates by initially employing an instance-aware reasoning method to dynamically capture pertinent information of entity pairs within the document and extract relational features. Following this, COMM takes into account the distribution of relations and the difficulty of samples to dynamically adjust the margins between prediction logits and the decision threshold, a process we call Concentrated Margin Maximization. In this way, COMM not only enhances the extraction of relevant relational features but also boosts DocRE performance by addressing the specific challenges posed by the data. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of COMM, especially its robustness when trained on low-quality data (achieves >10% performance gains).