K-Adapter: Infusing Knowledge into Pre-Trained Models with Adapters

We study the problem of injecting knowledge into large pre-trained models like BERT and RoBERTa. Existing methods typically update the original parameters of pre-trained models when injecting knowledge. However, when multiple kinds of knowledge are injected, the historically injected knowledge would be flushed away. To address this, we propose K-Adapter, a framework that retains the original parameters of the pre-trained model fixed and supports the development of versatile knowledge-infused model. Taking RoBERTa as the backbone model, K-Adapter has a neural adapter for each kind of infused knowledge, like a plug-in connected to RoBERTa. There is no information flow between different adapters, thus multiple adapters can be efficiently trained in a distributed way. As a case study, we inject two kinds of knowledge in this work, including (1) factual knowledge obtained from automatically aligned text-triplets on Wikipedia and Wikidata and (2) linguistic knowledge obtained via dependency parsing. Results on three knowledge-driven tasks, including relation classification, entity typing, and question answering, demonstrate that each adapter improves the performance and the combination of both adapters brings further improvements. Further analysis indicates that K-Adapter captures versatile knowledge than RoBERTa.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Result Benchmark
Entity Typing Open Entity K-Adapter ( fac-adapter ) F1 77.6916 # 1
Precision 79.6712 # 1
Recall 75.8081 # 2
Entity Typing Open Entity K-Adapter ( fac-adapter + lin-adapter ) F1 77.6127 # 2
Precision 78.9956 # 2
Recall 76.2774 # 1
Relation Classification TACRED K-Adapter F1 72.0 # 13
Relation Classification TACRED RoBERTa F1 71.3 # 8
Relation Extraction TACRED K-ADAPTER (F+L) F1 72.04 # 13
F1 (1% Few-Shot) 13.8 # 5
F1 (5% Few-Shot) 45.1 # 4
F1 (10% Few-Shot) 56.0 # 4

Methods