Eliciting and Understanding Cross-task Skills with Task-level Mixture-of-Experts

AbstractRecent works suggest that transformer models are capable of multi-tasking on diverse NLP tasks and adapt to new tasks efficiently. However, the potential of these multi-task models may be limited as they use the same set of parameters for all tasks. In contrast, humans tackle tasks in a more flexible way, by making proper presumptions on what skills and knowledge are relevant and executing only the necessary computations. Inspired by this, we propose to use task-level mixture-of-expert models, which has a collection of transformer layers (i.e., experts) and a router component to choose among these experts dynamically and flexibly. We find that these models help improve the average performance gain (ARG) metric by 2.6% when adapting to unseen tasks in few-shot settings, and by 5.6% in zero-shot generalization settings. Further, we show that the learned routing decisions and experts partly rediscover human categorization of NLP tasks – certain experts are strongly associated with extractive tasks, some with classification tasks, and some with tasks requiring world knowledge.