# Prior Omission of Dissimilar Source Domain(s) for Cost-Effective Few-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05234 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05234/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Meta-Learning for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00676/) (2018)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10190/) (2018)
- [Characterizing and Avoiding Negative Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09751/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Multi-task Learning for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05742/) (2017)
- [TapNet: Neural Network Augmented with Task-Adaptive Projection for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06549/) (2019)
- [Few-shot Slot Tagging with Collapsed Dependency Transfer and Label-enhanced Task-adaptive Projection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05702/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Text Classification with Distributional Signatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06039/) (2019)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Frame Semantic Parsing for Domain Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02363/) (2017)
- [Robust Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Example Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06870/) (2019)
- [Coach: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for Cross-domain Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11727/) (2020)
- [Using Similarity Measures to Select Pretraining Data for NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00585/) (2019)
- [Vector Projection Network for Few-shot Slot Tagging in Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09568/) (2020)
- [MCML: A Novel Memory-based Contrastive Meta-Learning Method for Few Shot Slot Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11635/) (2021)
- [Speaker-Sensitive Dual Memory Networks for Multi-Turn Slot Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10705/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot slot tagging is an emerging research topic in the field of Natural Language Understanding (NLU). With sufficient annotated data from source domains, the key challenge is how to train and adapt the model to another target domain which only has few labels. Conventional few-shot approaches use all the data from the source domains without considering inter-domain relations and implicitly assume each sample in the domain contributes equally. However, our experiments show that the data distribution bias among different domains will significantly affect the adaption performance. Moreover, transferring knowledge from dissimilar domains will even introduce some extra noises so that affect the performance of models. To tackle this problem, we propose an effective similarity-based method to select data from the source domains. In addition, we propose a Shared-Private Network (SP-Net) for the few-shot slot tagging task. The words from the same class would have some shared features. We extract those shared features from the limited annotated data on the target domain and merge them together as the label embedding to help us predict other unlabelled data on the target domain. The experiment shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with fewer source data. The result also proves that some training data from dissimilar sources are redundant and even negative for the adaption.