Prompt augmented generative replay via supervised contrastive training for lifelong intent detection

Abstract

Embodiments disclosed herein model lifelong intent detection as a class-incremental learning where a new set of intents/classes are added at each incremental step. To address the issue of catastrophic forgetting during lifelong intent detection (LID), an incremental learner is provided with Prompt Augmented Generative Replay, wherein unlike existing approaches that store real samples in replay memory, only concept words obtained from old intents are stored, which reduces memory consumption and speeds up incremental training still enabling not forgetting the old intents. Joint training of an incremental learner is carried out for LID and a pseudo-labeled utterance generation with objective is to classify a user utterance into one of multiple pre-defined intents by minimizing a total Loss function comprising a LID loss function, a Labeled Utterance Generation loss function, a Supervised Contrastive Training loss function, and a Knowledge Distillation loss function.