CrossFit: A Few-shot Learning Challenge for Cross-task Generalization in NLP

Abstract

Humans can learn a new language task more efficiently than machines, conceivably by leveraging their prior experience and knowledge in learning other tasks. In this paper, we explore whether such cross-task generalization ability can be acquired, and further applied to build better few-shot learners across diverse NLP tasks. We introduce CrossFit, a task setup for studying cross-task few-shot learning ability, which standardizes seen/unseen task splits, data access during different learning stages, and the evaluation protocols. In addition, we present NLP Few-shot Gym, a repository of 160 few-shot NLP tasks, covering diverse task categories and applications, and converted to a unified text-to-text format. Our empirical analysis reveals that the few-shot learning ability on unseen tasks can be improved via an upstream learning stage using a set of seen tasks. Additionally, the advantage lasts into medium-resource scenarios when thousands of training examples are available. We also observe that selection of upstream learning tasks can significantly influence few-shot performance on unseen tasks, asking further analysis on task similarity and transferability.