Meta Distant Transfer Learning for Pre-trained Language Models

With the wide availability of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), multi-task fine-tuning across domains has been extensively applied. For tasks related to distant domains with different class label sets, PLMs may memorize nontransferable knowledge for the target domain and suffer from negative transfer. Inspired by meta-learning, we propose the Meta Distant Transfer Learning (Meta-DTL) framework to learn the cross-task knowledge for PLM-based methods. Meta-DTL first employs task representation learning to mine implicit relations among multiple tasks and classes. Based on the results, it trains a PLM-based meta-learner to capture the transferable knowledge across tasks. The weighted maximum entropy regularizers are proposed to make meta-learner more task-agnostic and unbiased. Finally, the meta-learner can be fine-tuned to fit each task with better parameter initialization. We evaluate Meta-DTL using both BERT and ALBERT on seven public datasets. Experiment results confirm the superiority of Meta-DTL as it consistently outperforms strong baselines. We find that Meta-DTL is highly effective when very few data is available for the target task.