TemporalWiki, updating language models 'on the fly'

How can we update LMs *whenever* we want on up-to-date knowledge with *minimal* cost? Furthermore, how can we evaluate if each update was successful or not? We introduce ✨ TemporalWiki ✨, a lifelong benchmark providing the solution.

📝 https://t.co/vkLolTRHhi
🧵 1/8 pic.twitter.com/NblID1Tofm

— Joel Jang (@jang_yoel) May 3, 2022

Abstract of linked article:

Language Models (LMs) become outdated as the world changes; they often fail to per- form tasks requiring recent factual information which was absent or different during training, a phenomenon called temporal misalignment. This is especially a challenging problem because the research community still lacks a coherent dataset for assessing the adaptability of LMs to frequently-updated knowledge corpus such as Wikipedia. To this end, we introduce TEMPORALWIKI, a lifelong benchmark for ever-evolving LMs that utilizes the difference between consecutive snapshots of English Wikipedia and English Wikidata for training and evaluation, respectively. The benchmark hence allows researchers to periodically track an LM’s ability to retain previous knowledge and acquire updated/new knowledge at each point in time. We also find that training an LM on the diff data through continual learning methods achieves similar or better perplexity than on the entire snapshot in our benchmark with 12 times less computational cost, which verifies that factual knowledge in LMs can be safely updated with minimal training data via continual learning. The dataset and the code are available at this link.