Combining replay and LoRA for continual learning in natural language understanding

Large language models have significantly improved dialogue systems through enhanced capabilities in understanding queries and generating responses. Despite these enhancements, task-oriented dialogue systems- – which power many intelligent assistants – face challenges when adapting to new domains and applications. This challenge arises from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting, where models forget previously acquired knowledge when learning new tasks. This paper addresses this issue through continual learning techniques to preserve previously learned knowledge while seamlessly integrating new tasks and domains. We propose Experience Replay Informative-Low Rank Adaptation or ERI-LoRA, a hybrid continual learning method for natural language understanding in dialogue systems that effectively combines the replay-based methods with parameter-efficient techniques. Our experiments on intent detection and slot-filling tasks demonstrate that ERI-LoRA significantly outperforms competitive baselines in continual learning. The results of our catastrophic forgetting experiments demonstrate that ERI-LoRA maintains robust memory stability in the model, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating these effects.